Larian doesn’t reckon its approach to Baldur’s Gate 3 game design would be a huge hit with shareholders and publishers.
Despite its scale and massive success, Baldur’s Gate 3 is an RPG made by an independent developer that isn’t beholden to publisher nor shareholders. Although it has investors, including China-based tech giant Tencent, it’s generally understood that the development team operates independently from them. In short, they get to do what they want.
In a new interview with PC Gamer , Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke suggested that a buyout would lead to a constriction on the team’s creativity and unique method of making games that keep players consistently engaged.
“If you see it, it’ll scare you, as a shareholder, as a publisher,” Vincke said. “The very first thing you will try to do is get it under control—you will try to scope it, you will try to box it, you will try to control it, which is exactly the opposite of what we want to do. These days, especially when you have so much entertainment, people are only going to put their time into something that keeps on engaging them.”
In the case of Baldur’s Gate specifically, there’s a ton of content that players will never see even on their second or third playthrough because of the way the story branches off in so many different possible directions depending on player choice. It’s that sort of content that may appear superfluous to people outside the creative team forking up the development funds, but is nonetheless crucial to story and immersion in Larian’s view.
“In the type of game that we make, that means that we need to have a lot of content, and you put a lot of content in there that nobody’s ever going to see. Which is really not obvious, right? Because it’s like, why are we spending a million dollars on a dragon, which nobody’s ever going to see, except like five people who made that obscure choice? Because if they see it, they have to be happy too. So that’s why I put the bloody dragon there, because that’s the logical consequence of the things that they’ve done.”
Of course, Larian was right to trust its intuition, as Baldur’s Gate 3 is widely regarded as 2023’s GOTY despite fierce competition from Alan Wake 2, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. In the same interview, Vincke shared his initial response to the RPG’s explosive launch, saying at the time, ‘You know what this means? It means we get to do it again’.
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