Baldur's Gate 3 Cut Content Would've Opened The Door For A Major D&D Setting

Summary The Fugue Plane would have expanded Baldur's Gate 3's death system into something completely different.

This Limbo-like setting is where freshly departed souls are judged in the Forgotten Realms.

Although not in Baldur's Gate 3, the Fugue Plane concept could reappear in future Larian titles or fan mods.

Baldur's Gate 3 is an enormous game in terms of just how much there is to do, but it's no surprise that some content got left on the cutting room floor during development. The Dungeons & Dragons setting of the game opens up a terrifying number of possibilities, and including every interesting idea would bloat both the game and its development cycle to a completely unsustainable degree. The balance found in the finished product feels just right in most regards, but some concepts that didn't make it in would have added tantalizing possibilities.

Although DnD lore features a variety of vast realms, Baldur's Gate 3 is set almost entirely within the area directly surrounding the city of Baldur's Gate, which is just one major settlement in the Sword Coast area of Faerûn. It does venture outside of this somewhat grounded region in some specific story instances, making brief sojourns into both the Astral Plane and the Shadowfell, but most of the reaches of the Forgotten Realms are left unexplored. If one concept explored during development had made it in, however, a lot more time might have been spent elsewhere.

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Baldur's Gate 3 Almost Included The Fugue Plane

A Cut Idea Would Have Made Death Completely Different

In a roundtable with PC Gamer, Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke described plans for a more complicated death system in Baldur's Gate 3 that would add another plane into the mix. In the final version of the game, an individual character's death can simply be treated with revivify, while the entire party being wiped out bounces things to a standard game-over screen (or, in the case of the grueling Honour Mode setting, ends the run altogether). At one point, however, death was supposed to take the playable character to the Fugue Plane, a kind of Limbo from DnD lore.

Although fifth edition DnD doesn't clarify the Fugue Plane's location, the fourth edition placed it in the Astral Sea.

Although Vincke's mention of the system is fairly brief, he does clarify that it would temporarily separate the dead character from the rest of the party, who "would still be walking around in the material plane." It's an interesting concept that would add another level of complexity to progression in Baldur's Gate 3, and exploring it fully could have made death feel very different than in most RPGs. At the same time, it's easy to see how it ended up getting cut, as incorporating the Fugue Plane in a way that didn't bog things down too much might be difficult.

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The Fugue Plane Is An Interesting Part Of D&D Lore

Souls Are Judged In This Unusual Location

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The mention of the Fugue Plane is somewhat surprising, as it's been mostly absent from fifth edition DnD, but it's been a part of the game's history for a long time. The 5e sourcebook Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide does briefly cover the Fugue Plane in a section called "The Afterlife," which establishes that general beliefs hold that the newly dead go to the City of Judgment on the Fugue Plane. There, the servants of the gods can take them onward or send them back reborn, while those still lingering are ultimately judged by the Lord of the Dead, Kelemvor.

Baldur's Gate 3 lore could have intersected nicely with the City of Judgment, as the death gods known as the Dead Three end up playing an integral role in the narrative. Unlike these more nefarious figures, Kelemvor is of a neutral persuasion, offering a potentially interesting counterpart that could still believably stay out of the main narrative thrust. Although it's impossible to say how exactly Larian planned to implement the idea without further clarification, Kelemvor's judgment might have played into some kind of karma system or used another means of judging worthiness.

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The Fugue Plane might not be the most glamorous DnD setting to represent in-game, as it's traditionally described as being gray and bland. It has, however, appeared in video game form before in the Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion Mask of the Betrayer. Here, the main character could choose whether or not to lead an army against the City of Judgment to tear down the Wall of the Faithless that houses the slowly dissolving souls of those deemed unworthy.

BG3 Could Have Made The Fugue Plane Memorable

Larian's Strength At Crafting Environments Is Undeniable

As an environment, the chief strength of the Fugue Plane lies in its chilling atmosphere, which Mask of the Betrayer represented well. Larian Studios could likely have managed a similar feat in Baldur's Gate 3, with the Shadow-Cursed Lands, in particular, showing the studio's strength at crafting a haunting setting. The Mask of the Betrayer connection could also be part of why the idea ultimately didn't make it, however, as Larian might not have wanted to step on the toes of another major video game story that offered branching possibilities in the Fugue Plane.

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For a long time, the easy fallback for interesting ideas that never made it into Baldur's Gate 3 was to assume they might still be on the table for DLC, but the news that Larian is moving on definitely removes that from the equation. The concept could still come back in a future game from the studio, however, as there's no reason that a Divinity title or a new IP couldn't dive deeper into the consequences of death. Finding ways to incorporate game design with the actual narrative and lore of a world is always exciting, so the idea remains an intriguing prospect.

Regardless, it's definitely too big of an undertaking to show up in any general Baldur's Gate 3 update, so it's unlikely that the Fugue Plane will be making another official video game appearance any time soon. It's still ripe for tabletop play, however, and the Baldur's Gate 3 modding tools that Larian is adding in the near future could make it easier for fans to implement their own takes on cut content. Death in Baldur's Gate 3 ultimately ends up being pretty passé, and although that might be for the best, it's interesting to imagine what could have been.Source:PC Gamer