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While Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3 is a massive success on PC and console that’s still growing in popularity, the game spent years in early access before most players jumped on board. During that period, the amazing RPG was a key title for Google’s now-dead video game streaming service, Google Stadia.
Baldur’s Gate 3 was revealed in a Google Stadia presentation back in 2019 and was developed in early access for the platform as well as PC. While Stadia eventually shut down prior to the game’s full release, it still had a major impact on its development.
Stadia led to Baldur’s Gate 3’s biggest weakness
In an hour-long tech-focused panel, senior graphics programmer at Larian, Wannes Vanderstappen, revealed that the biggest technical weakness on Baldur’s Gate 3’s engine on the time of release was the lack of DitectX 12 support.
As Larian has partnered with Google Stadia and Stadia required the use of the Vulkan API, Baldur’s Gate 3 was developed to accommodate the failed streaming service’s requirements. While the game also included DirectX 11 support, upgrading to DirectX 12 was simply far too complex for the team mid-development.
“As some of you know, DirectX 12 is almost ten years old now,” Vanderstappen said. “The first question we always get is: ‘why use Vulkan on PC, when you need to support DX12 for Xbox Series anyway?’ Well, there’s a simple answer for that: Stadia.”
“Baldur’s Gate 3 shipped in early access on PC and Google Stadia, Stadia needed Vulkan and because we shipped in early access this also meant a shorter release timeframe.”
The senior graphics programmer explained that DirectX 12 was unsupported on a lot of hardware during the early access period as opposed to Vuilkan, and the team needed Vulkan support for its Google Stadia partnership.
“What was the problem? Well, BG3 was in full production already,” Vanderstappen said. “The engine code team only moved to BG3 after BG3 happened because we were still working on Divinity Original Sin 2: Definitive Edition for the consoles. So, the entire company was actively using our DX11 toolset which means we couldn’t break anything while replacing DX11 things with Vulkan.”
DirectX 12 was attempted…
Vanderstappen explained that the team did try to move towards DirectX 12 during development, but everything went wrong. The team developed a different code branch which diverged too quickly and “was very hard to move in new features on the main branch”.
This led to everything slowing down behind the scenes and new problems kept arising that the team had to fix. However, with most programmers on the team having little experience with programming for Vulkan, Baldur’s Gate 3 tech issues ended up going unnoticed for large periods of time.
“We ended up in this viscous cycle where no one was using the Vulkan toolset, which means it wasn’t really stress tested, which means Vulkan really stable, and so on,” Vanderstappen explained. “We didn’t really find a good time to switch our toolset.. we couldn’t add new features that were only possible on newer APIs because everyone was working for DX11.”
In the end, DirectX 11 was released as a backup as earlier versions of the game on Vulkan kept crashing. Vanderstappen admits releasing on Vulkan was “a bit scary”, leading to the team already abandoning the technology for its next game.