where did the fugue plane go? [VIDEO]

#fugue #plane #VIDEO

Larian Studios’ excellent (and award-winning) game had an interesting mechanic that we’ve seen before, but it wasn’t tied to the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) universe.

If you play Honor mode in Baldur’s Gate 3, you have perma-death. When we die, there is no possibility of resurrection. In addition, a resurrection scroll is needed to be among the living again, following the fifth rule system of D&D (albeit with a slight modification, because originally a powerful spell is needed, more necessary and more advanced depending on when our character died (if earlier, difficult to implement, if right now, even easier).

Originally, however, Baldur’s Gate 3 also had a more complicated solution, and the co-founder and CEO of the studio, Swen Vincke, talked about this during a round table discussion. If we died, we found ourselves on the Fugue Plane, while the rest of our team would have remained on the normal, material plane. The fugue plane (the Hungarian official name may differ) is the place where souls migrate immediately after death. This is where the gods come and guide everyone to the appropriate heaven. If no one embraces us, we become part of a living wall around the City of Strife/Judgment until we crumble. There are gods of death in this city (e.g. Myrkul, who is an important character in Baldur’s Gate 3).

Although Larian Studios built the system for this plane, it ended up not being used in the game, and it may still be used by the Belgian studio in another project. It probably would have been bad for the pace of the gameplay, because death happens during combat, and it might have been too slow to return to the ranks of the living. Baldur’s Gate 3 allows players to run multiple different battles in the same game if they want, as the initiation order is determined locally. But with this, they can “pause” them so that they never run their own turn, while their allies who are not in the initiative order run around the rest of the world unhindered. It would have been impossible to combine this with the fugue plane.

In 2006’s Prey, if you died, you had to spend some time on a spiritual plane to come back to life. It also slowed down the gameplay a bit…

Source: PCGamer