Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke recently discussed various topics in an interview published by GamesIndustry. The director of Baldur’s Gate 3 talked about avoiding overlap with Bethesda’s Starfield (Larian’s game launched in early August on PC, while Starfield was released in early September) and his respect for the studio.
I have a lot of respect for Bethesda… If you’re at sea and a bigger boat passes by, the rule is that you go out of the way for the bigger boat – they were the bigger boat. We went out of the way for Bethesda, but we still wanted the world to pay attention to us. We had a lot of narrative-heavy permutations, so we wanted to showcase that the game was very big on identity, and how that identity is reflected into the game. We were also a much more cinematic game. Immersion gameplay was similar in what our ambitions were. I think those first three were definitely highlights of what we wanted to focus on.
The founder of Larian also said that he has trying to push back the studio’s own desire to grow.
I have expressed a strong desire to the teams not to grow. The teams have told me in extreme detail why we needed to grow, so there’s that fight going on right now. I’m actually the one that is trying to hold it back. And they have legitimate reasons why they want to grow it, because they have ambitions they need to achieve, so we’re trying to keep it sane.
Larian admittedly grew a lot already for the past few games. The development team had only 50 developers when it made Divinity: Original Sin and then tripled in size to make its acclaimed sequel. For Baldur’s Gate 3, though, that wasn’t nearly enough, so Larian now employs over 470 developers across its seven offices (Ghent, Belgium; Quebec City, Canada; Dublin, Ireland; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Guildford, United Kingdom; Barcelona, Spain; and Warsaw, Poland).
It’s already triple-A sized, and Vincke clearly fears what would happen with another growth spurt. The Larian boss already clarified the next project won’t need to be bigger than Baldur’s Gate 3, anyway, and that’s more than fair – that was an absolutely gargantuan game in which I spent 148 hours.
The Baldur’s Gate saga will continue without Larian, with Wizards of the Coast already talking to other developers about continuing the cRPG franchise.
