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It's early July, almost a year since Larian launched Baldur's Gate 3—a year in which the studio has collected a vast number of awards and accolades for its monumental RPG—and the team has swapped the Forgotten Realms for the swelteringly hot Spanish city of Barcelona. Larian is here to discuss its next game behind closed doors. A couple of days ago, on July 8, it held a summit to talk about kicking off a new RPG."Lift off," as CEO Swen Vincke puts it.
"I call it chaos at scale," Vincke adds."We're a studio that gives a lot of freedom to developers. We encourage it, actually, bottom up, because it's unmanageable otherwise. Different people have to do their own thing. And then obviously, we have to manage the chaos that comes out of it, so that's a large part of the job.
While Larian's approach would likely terrify a lot of publishers and investors, there's no doubt that many of them would still like a piece of this pie. The industry is obsessed with the studio, and all eyes are on what it's planning next. In the year since launch, it has undeniably become one of the world's most influential developers. But Vincke attributes its series of big successes, from D:OS onwards, to its biggest failure: Ego Draconis.
As well as this reinvention came things like the complete dominance of digital distribution,"and there weren't 320,000 middlemen that were just taking cuts on everything", as well as the rise of Kickstarter and early access. This helped Larian fund D:OS1 and 2, and then actually make money out of them. Now, though, it's in a position where it doesn't need Kickstarter. Unsurprisingly, BG3 has filled its coffers.
Larian has been discussing BG3 for years, and working on it for a lot longer, so while Vincke and Smith still talk about it with enthusiasm and eagerly share anecdotes about its development, it's tinged with, if not exhaustion, then at least a readiness to be done with the game. BG3 was initially planned to be a one-shot. No expansions. No sequels. At least not from Larian. But there was a period when more Baldur's Gate was on the cards.
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