Baldur’s Gate 3‘s director has reflected on the game’s early development process, and why he regretted saying it could be the RPG of the decade.
At a presentation at Digital Dragons in Poland, Baldur’s Gate 3 director Swen Vincke revealed to attendees how the RPG looked in the early stages of development. Vincke revealed Larian originally wanted to have a “dungeon master” tell the player what was going on via voiceover, but Vincke felt it was a “little too ambitious” for Larian to handle.
Baldur’s Gate 3’s early development years also proved how “inexperienced” Larian was with making cinematics, Vincke further revealed. “But we felt really, really, really confident because we had already made two RPGs, they were hit RPGs, what could go wrong?” Vincke continued.
“I was so confident, in fact, that I’m gonna do something I would never do again,” the Baldur’s Gate 3 director continued. Vincke then played an old clip of himself presenting Larian’s plans for Baldur’s Gate 3 at an internal meeting to owner Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro, during which he claimed Baldur’s Gate 3 could be the “RPG of the decade.”
“Almost instantly, I regretted my words,” Vincke said of the older clip. “So we got into a whole shitload of trouble. It began in the first year – so you can see nothing is moving,” the director continued, playing a clip of a very early cinematic design in Baldur’s Gate 3.
“The team just kept on having meeting after meeting where they wanted to perfect everything that they had done wrong in the past. The problem is, when you chase perfection, you can spend a lot of time discussing things. Ultimately, we got over this phase of discussion after more than a year, and we started producing stuff, and then we ran into a whole bunch of other problems,” Vincke continued.
The “number of features” was one of the major problems Larian had to deal with early on, as was the growth of the studio itself to deal with the amount of features. Inexperience with cinematics was a major issue as well, as was the fact that Larian basically didn’t have a pipeline in place for creating cinematics in Baldur’s Gate 3, Vincke further revealed.
Another problem was that the programming team was “lying through their teeth,” Vincke added, saying that if a programmer asks you for “500 days” to get something right, they basically have no idea what they’re doing. But the best approach to this was apparently just to “leave them alone,” the Baldur’s Gate 3 director also revealed. No pressure, then.
Add in that Larian needed to constantly optimize performance as Baldur’s Gate 3 was shipping on so many platforms, and you’re just beginning to scratch the surface of the problems. Larian had a headcount of around 120 people when Vincke proclaimed that it could be the “RPG of the decade” – by the end of development, this figure had ballooned to around 450.
Maybe Larian’s next game might be a little less chaotic in its approach, now that its developers have all this experience under their belts. Or, rather, that should be ‘both games,’ because the studio is working on two “very ambitious RPGs” right now, and it just opened a brand new studio in Warsaw, Poland, to bring these plans to fruition.
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