Baldur's Gate 3 devs Larian discuss making two new games at once: "in practice, we will probably be miserable"
"I hope I can tell you five years from now: we cracked it," says Swen Vincke
Last April, Baldur's Gate 3 developers Larian announced that they were working on two new games, neither of which is Baldur's Gate 4. Now, fresh from the labour of pumping BG3 full of bees, Larian boss Swen Vincke has shared a little more about how Belgium's finest mindflayer-wranglers are organising development of these mystery projects.
The idea is that one will spin out of pre-production just as the other completes production, avoiding the familiar problem where lots of animators, modellers and other staff have to sit around aimlessly fondling D20s, while management and the Ideas People work on the direction and schedule. Instead, production staff will work on one game while the other is in pre-production, reducing downtime. Vincke acknowledges that the odds of pulling this transition off flawlessly are low. "In practice, we will probably be miserable," he says, "and there's going to be plenty of stuff that went wrong." Words to live by.
All that's from an interview with Gamespot, as passed on by cheery RPS fanzine PCGamer. Vincke described the first of Larian's two new things as both "crazy-ambitious" and "shaping up quite well, actually". But he added that working on the first new game alongside the second, later project is "not the easiest thing in the universe, because we make very complicated games, lots of permutations, lots of agency for players."
Still, Vincke thinks it's worth doing to avoid the stop-start pre-production/production issue. "When that very large group is finished," commented Vincke, "and the people at the beginning are not ready, then everybody is fucked, because everybody has to wait. That's what we're trying to avoid."
For context, Larian have around 470 people on staff as of 2024, and currently operate seven studios around the world. While the craven backlog-expanders amongst you may focus on the prospect of Larian releasing games at a faster rate, Vincke hopes that one outcome of running projects in parallel will be less ambiguity and a better quality of life for the developers.
"I hope I can tell you five years from now: We cracked it. We figured it out," he said. "This is what we're doing now. Here's game one, we're making this completely different thing. Game two, and when game two is going to be ready, we already have another thing that's gonna come. If we can make that work in a really good way, that we enjoy our lives, that's gonna be mission accomplished."
What could Larian's undisclosed somethings be? The boring smart money says that one of them is Divinity: Original Sin 3. Still, "crazy-ambitious" covers a lot of ground. Perhaps they're making an RPG in which you play as a large body of water or the concept of Wednesdays. Perhaps they're conjuring a whole, actually new genre of fantasy - something the marketing people can't summarise by cramming "punk" onto the end of a familiar word and acting like they've just discovered penicillin.
Disclosure: Former RPS deputy editor Adam Smith (RPS in peace) now works at Larian and is the lead writer for Baldur's Gate 3. Former contributor Emily Gera also works on it.