Larian Studios - Swen Vincke Interview @ IGN

[HiddenX]

IGN interviewed Swen Vincke about Baldur's Gate 3, Larian and the game industry:

Baldur's Gate 3: Director Swen Vincke Answers All Our Questions About Foregoing DLC, AAA Development, and More

"As far as we are concerned, the chapter is closed."

At the Game Developers Conference 2024, Larian Studios head Swen Vincke gave an incredibly detailed talk entitled "The Secrets of Baldur's Gate 3." In it, he divulged a number of new details about the game's development, ending on the bombshell that Larian would neither be making DLC for Baldur's Gate 3, nor making Baldur's Gate 4. The studio is moving on.

Shortly after his talk, IGN had the pleasure of sitting down with Vincke to talk about... well, everything. The talk we'd just heard, the news he dropped, how the studio is doing post-release, how he feels about the games industry, all of it. We've already written up some of the biggest new reveals Vincke shared with us during that conversation, such as the playable Ketheric Thorm and the studio's plans for additional detail in the game's evil endings. But Vincke shared so many cool insights during our hour-long chat that we felt we needed to share them all with the world. Here's our (lightly edited for clarity) full conversation with Vincke from GDC:

Do we want to start with the elephant in the room? I mean, you kind of dropped a bombshell at the end of that talk, right? You're not doing Baldur's Gate 4. You're not going back to the world of D&D. Obviously you're working on something new, the studio is not going to implode tomorrow. You said a little bit in the talk, but why not Baldur's Gate 4?

Vincke: Well, we started actually thinking about it after Baldur's Gate 3, because of all the success, the obvious thing would've been to do DLC. So we started on one and we started even thinking about BG 4, but we noticed very rapidly that our hearts were not ticking faster. We hadn't really had closure on BG 3 yet, and just to jump forward into something new felt wrong. We also had spent a whole bunch of time converting the system into a video game, and we wanted to do new things. There were a lot of constraints in making D&D, and the 5th Edition is not an easy system to put into a video game, and we had all these ideas of new combat that we wanted to try out, and so they were not compatible. You could see the team was doing it because everybody felt like we had to do it, but it wasn't really coming from the heart and we're very much a studio all about being from the heart.

[...]

More information.

 

[HiddenX]

@Couchpotato spotted a similar interview at Eurogamer.

 

[Couchpotato]

Like I mentioned on a forum thread I'm glad Swen has enough resources and can say whatever he wants to right now, as he earned the right to criticize the industry.

However let's hope his success continues and his 470 employee's keep their jobs.

 

[Vaelith]

It's significant that Larian does not feel forced to layoff staff when about everyone else is doing it. In part, it's probably because Larian isn't run by investors and shareholders who want to scrape every inch of profit for themselves without care for any collateral damage. I'm pretty sure Swen is aware he could optimize profit by pruning part of his staff, and he's keeping them for humane reasons more than anything else.

I'm sure there are many people sharpening their knives waiting for the day Larian falters to bury them under a high stack of "I knew it all along" and "I told you so", but these people have been there for 8 years now, and there aren't any signs of Larian slowing down; and that's a mighty long time to be living in concealed spite.

 

[Jarrah]

I think it's encouraging to hear that the studio is only taking on projects they feel passionate about. To me, that means that their hearts are in the right place, and they aren't looking at video games like a business exec would be (Hello Blizzard and Bioware - err I meant EA).
I was hoping Larian might take on Icewind Dale, as I did read somewhere that they were doing field recordings of ambient things, like snow falling. Fingers crossed, I guess.