Around a month ago, Larian’s Michael Douse revealed that Baldur’s Gate 3 had sold ‘way over’ 10 million units. In a new interview with Gamespot from GDC 2024, Larian CEO Swen Vincke provided an updated sales figure by comparing the studio’s latest game from the previous one, Divinity: Original Sin 2.
It’s almost double D:OS 2 now, so it’s really doing really, really well.
As pointed out on ResetEra by user Son of Sparda, last time we heard, the most recent installment in the Divinity franchise had sold 7.5 million units. As such, it is reasonable to assume Baldur’s Gate 3 may be around 15 million units at this point, which is an amazing feat in a little more than half a year. The game could perhaps get even bigger if it ever came to Nintendo Switch and iPad like Divinity: Original Sin 2 did eventually.
Despite the incredible commercial success and equally astounding critical success that showered Larian with all kinds of awards, Swen Vincke dropped a bomb at the end of his GDC 2024 Baldur’s Gate 3 talk when he announced there wouldn’t be a DLC, a sequel, or indeed another D&D-based game in partnership with Wizards of the Coast.
In the Gamespot interview, Larian’s founder explained a bit more the thought process behind this decision:
When it came to Baldur’s Gate 3, everybody was telling us ‘you got to make DLC and really you should be starting on a sequel, this is so successful and made so much money’. For a while, I was actually like, yeah, that’s what we should be doing, we should change our plans and do that. The team actually said, yeah, we should be doing that.
But then later in the year I realized that’s not what we’re made for. That’s literally the opposite of what Larian is about. We want to do big new things, we don’t want to rehash the thing that we’ve done already, so that’s why we said we’re not going to do that. So, we’re back on our original plan which is going to the next thing and the bigger thing.
What’s next for Larian, then? Well, Vincke talked to Eurogamer about that. The team already had picked two games to make after Baldur’s Gate 3 and is now back on that track. According to Vincke, they’ll be big, ambitious, different from what Larian has done before, but also familiar.
Even more interesting is that the Larian founder has a dream RPG in mind and hopes that next-gen hardware will include some tech to make it closer to reality. Here’s what he told Gamespot:
So this was part of a larger plan that I have towards what I called a very big RPG that will rule them all. I think there’s some tech that we don’t have yet. I don’t know what the specs are going to be in the next gen. I hope we’re going to get something that’s going to bring us closer.
It’s hard to guess what Vincke has in mind specifically, though it might have something to do with a narrowly missed $1 million stretch goal originally planned for Divinity: Original Sin 1. Back then, Larian promised backers that NPC schedules, day/night cycles, and weather systems would have an impact on NPCs and monsters. The changes in weather and moons would also influence the different schools of magic. These features never materialized not only for D:OS 1 but for the sequel as well, or indeed Baldur’s Gate 3. However, advancements in technology could make that feasible at some point in the future, allowing Larian to craft a truly living game world.
