Astarion actor Neil Newbon has urged Baldur’s Gate 3 fans to give Craig Maizin’s HBO TV adaptation a chance.
Newbon, who doesn’t appear to be attached to the project (I don’t think any actors are attached to it yet; I’m not sure there’s even a script), encouraged people to give Maizin and his team time to develop their idea, and to judge it after watching it rather than beforehand.
“I really hope people give them space to make the show that they want to make,” Newbon told FRVR. “It’s really important that artistic endeavours are left to cook. What they’ll do with it, who knows? But he’s [showrunner Craig Mazin] an amazing writer. I think he’s a great showrunner as well. I think Chernobyl is a great example of how good his writing is, man.
“I think the worry about the internet at the moment, sometimes, is that people really pile on a lot, and they really get worried and upset. And I understand that comes from a place of love, often they’re very worried about things, but nothing’s happened yet, you know what I mean?”
Newbon added: “If they do it right, then I think it’ll be a fantastic TV series. Let them cook, man. Let them do their thing and enjoy it.”
The existence of a Baldur’s Gate 3 HBO adaptation was only announced back in February. We know that game developer Larian isn’t involved but that Maizin, who apparently spent nearly 1000 hours playing the game, was keen to visit the studio and speak with the team there. Larian boss Swen Vincke seemed enthusiastic about the adaptation saying the team there thought it was “cool” and that the endings of Baldur’s Gate 3 were designed in a way that “they could serve as narrative soil for a new adventure”. “There’s plenty of directions they could go,” Vincke said.
Newbon went on to say that “it’s healthier to watch the thing and then have a reaction to it”, and that “sometimes people get very affected by stuff they don’t know”. A one-to-one adaptation isn’t possible because a game and a TV series are fundamentally different things. “I think that’s important to understand,” he said. “You have to see that this is the vision of people of the best story they can do with the material that they have.”
Craig Maizin was the showrunner and writer of HBO’s The Last of Us series, so he’s no stranger to adapting a beloved game series for television, but reaction to the second series was much less favourable than to the first. A third season of The Last of Us is planned and is expected to be the last. Presumably whatever Maizin is doing with Baldur’s Gate 3 will wait until after that’s wrapped.
