Remember Candlekeep' Monastery Library-Fortress is the first area of the original Baldur's Gate, where you can cure a sick cow, find a book in a haystack or kill a mouse in a warehouse, enough to think I should get on my quest instead of thoroughly rinsing the tutorial zone for every possible bit of XP. Most of them were classic, which I could miss the first time I played it because it was so naive. Oops

We can return to Candlekeep in Chapter 6 of Baldur's Gate, but we had to revisit it again in Baldur's Gate3. "I had a bunch of ideas for it," lead writer Adam Smith told Rock Paper Shotgun. "I think it's a good setting because it's back to where it all started. It was always convincing. But if you get an academic dungeon, because there is something interesting in such a library dungeon. It is vast, you know, in lore. And the idea that you have this place you need to go to do research or something, or you need to go down to it. And you also say that this is where the Burr Spawn was raised — you know, it's very, very attractive.

Larian CEO Swen Vincke also attended the interview, reminding Smith of the "crazy shit" he wanted to put in the candle keep at Baldur's Gate3.

"So there's a place in the forgotten realm," Smith explained, "or the D&D universe, I should say, is called the distant realm. And some of the lore says that's where mind flayers started — it's a place of cosmic horror, you know. So I had this whole idea that you would have this seer, who sits at the bottom of a candle key, who is basically staring at a distant realm, you know, and is completely crazy, and you go there and find what he's looking at. You need to find the right solution for your needs. I still think it would have been very cool."

Unfortunately, it was not. Adding an additional chapter on the way to the city of Baldur's Gate would ruin the game's pacing, but this is frankly already big enough to go on, and Smith suggests that adding more to Baldur's Gate 3 would have been exhausting. "And, you know, there's a point where it goes like, well, is this content for content?" I hate the word "content", but you know — is it actually added to the story and the journey I'm on, or am I in my adventure "You can have too much climax." They are also exhausted. I'm not talking about sex again."

Larian also discarded the idea that if you died at Baldur's Gate3, you would be sent to the Limbo of the forgotten realm itself, the Fugue plane. There are certainly a lot of ideas in the studio that were eventually put to one side, but I can't see them being explored in extensions or sequels — Larian is either Baldur's Gate or