PC Gamer have interviewed Swen Vincke about Baldur's Gate 3.
More information.Larian Studios always goes all-in. After nearly bankrupting itself to make Divinity: Original Sin, Larian tripled in size to pull off an ambitious sequel, growing to around 150 developers. With one of the best RPGs of the decade under its belt, Larian then set out to make Baldur's Gate 3. A year in pre-production let them build out estimates of how much work this even more ambitious game would take, hiring developers to work on fancy cinematics Divinity didn't have. "We thought we had it all figured out. We even estimated how big we'd have to become," said Larian founder Swen Vincke.
They were wrong.
"I never expected us to be 400 people to make BG3," Vincke told me. "Nobody expected it. But it's literally what we needed to do it. We had a choice. There was a moment where we started understanding what we needed to do to make this game. We thought we understood. Then we actually really understood. And so we had two choices: we could scale it down, or we could scale ourselves up. And so we chose to scale ourselves up."
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Larian's currently working on Baldur's gate itself, building out the city, and also filling out D&D's spell library and implementing its remaining classes. Then there's time-consuming polish, which is why he announced that Baldur's Gate 3 won't be fully finished until 2023.
"This is a very specific niche of game where you have a lot of narrative with a lot of systems coming together," he said. "If your agency is [limited], you're guided down the routes, you're not gonna be happy when you're playing it. It breaks the entire thing. The problem is the only alternative is just, fuuuuck, you need to cover it all. But we figured it out, and we're doing it.