Baldur’s Gate 3 is coming to Stadia and PC after series’ 18-year hiatus

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Baldur’s Gate 3 is officially coming from Larian Studios, creators of Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Original Sin 2, as was rumored – and it’s coming to Google Stadia. 

The game was revealed during Google’s first Stadia Connect presentation announcing details for the streaming game service. Baldur’s Gate 3 will be among the 31 titles initially announced for the platform.

The new game comes 19 years since the last great main installment Baldur's Gate 2, or 18 if you count its expansion a year later. But fans are as eager as ever for a return: the barest hint of a possible sequel emerged last week and the internet went nuts. 

Despite the official reveal, we still don’t know much about the game nor its release date. All we have to go by is the teaser Larian showed off during the Stadia presentation – and be warned, because the one linked below is an uncut version (read: more gore/body horror) of the teaser:

 What...was that? 

In the teaser, an unnamed warrior stumbles through streets cluttered with bodies. Sickened, he spits up teeth and screams as his body splits and twists into something truly gruesome...and tentacled. By the end, he’s transformed into a signature creature from Dungeons and Dragons: a mind flayer.

These Cthulhuian horrors look like water-logged humanoids with squids for heads, and in role-playing games, they’re often malevolent beings who wield magic for their own nefarious ends. So it seems here, as the trailer ends with the newly-transformed mind flayer staring ahead while dozens of others appear in the clouds behind with every lightning flash.

In Baldur’s Gate 3, the mind flayers once soared through their astral empire in vessels known as nautaloids – an empire that fell long ago, but now the creatures are assailing the land, Larian CEO Swen Vincke told PCGamer in an extensive interview.

"Those are big problems," says Vincke. "They want to restore their empire, so we see the mind flayers invading a city, with a nautaloid, so you can imagine what might happen—but it's not what you'll expect!"

Vincke further described Larian’s campaign to convince Wizards of the Coast to let them develop Baldur’s Gate 3, but the rightsholders feared the game studio was too ‘green’ until they’d almost finished Divinity: Original Sin 2. That title was a critical and commercial success that embodied the appeal of the old Baldur’s games – hence why the internet was excited at news Larian might be involved in the official sequel.

 Okay, but when? 

Unfortunately, Larian didn’t reveal when we’ll get to delve into Baldur’s Gate 3. Nor is it clear whether the game will be available when Google Stadia launches in ‘fall’ (third-quarter) 2019. That would be pretty exciting, but if you aren’t down with the search company’s streaming service, it’s also coming to PC.

• Get all the info you need on Google Stadia

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