Larian on signing Baldur's Gate 3, approaching a new era, and games you've never heard about
Past, present and future.
I saw sides to Baldur's Gate 3 last week - at an event for the launch version of the game (due 3rd August on PC) - I didn't realise were there. I saw the game transform into a horror not far removed from Silent Hill, in an eerie Victorian-style hospital where nurses with rotten faces cooed around a grotesque surgeon who had scalpels for fingers and torture on his mind. I saw the game revel in gore through a headline-grabbing Dark Urge origin players can choose to play with, although it's not recommended for first-timers because, at certain points, The Dark Urge will take over your character and make you do horrendous things that will change your playthrough irrevocably. Seriously; I offed a major companion at the beginning of the game and that's it for me now - they're dead forever. I loved it.
I loved it for many reasons but primarily because it reminded me there's still so much we don't know about Baldur's Gate 3, despite it having been available in early access for nearly three years now. We've only ever seen one act, and there are two more. There's the darker second act I mentioned above, and the climactic third act in the eponymous city of Baldur's Gate - a place so dense with systems it's got its own newspaper that reacts to you. Its headlines will depend on your actions there, and in some cases, even the interviews you give.
Baldur's Gate 3 always seems to have a surprise ready. It's a box of chocolates that never seems to run out. And this speaks to the colossal project it's been. I'm always surprised when I'm reminded how many people have worked on it - around 400 people. To put that into perspective, Divinity: Original Sin, released in 2014, was made with fewer than 50 people. It's been nearly a decade of extraordinary success and growth for Belgian company Larian, which now has studios all around the world.
Larian is on the cusp of a new era, I believe. Baldur's Gate 3 will, if all things go to plan, make it one of the most well-known role-playing game studios on the planet. It will stand alongside the BioWares and the CD Projekt Reds and the Bethesda Game Studios of the world.
It's with the studio on the precipice that I sat down with Larian founder Swen Vincke at the event, for a long and candid conversation about the studio's history and the origins of the Baldur's Gate 3. And, of course, where it goes from here.
Swen Vincke: Um, nervous, excited.
What are you nervous about?
It's a very big game so it keeps on surprising us. It has its own quirks and eccentricities, at both a development level and at a gameplay level. We'll be very surprised what players are going to do with it, and I'm just hoping everything's going to work, so this is probably my biggest worry.
But also very proud because what the team's accomplished is insane. When you look at it, how everything interweaves with one another, it's a thing of beauty.
I can see how proud you are of it when you're demoing it. Is there something in particular you're most proud of?
That it works.
We wanted to marry a cinematic, triple-A RPG with systemic freedom, which is basically the two things that we've always been trying to do, but never at this scale, never at this level. The fact that we managed to do this is really an achievement.
You can see that the team is at the peak of its craft, and they've been training for a long time, building up to this. They're a very, very talented team, and together they've done something - it's a big leap for us and it shows.
Something the industry talks more openly about now is crunch, and we see it particularly in the lead up to a game's release. Are you crunching?
We're certainly doing overtime as we're getting close to release.
Is that just another word for crunch?
Well no, because it's not as if people are sitting in the office on the weekends. There's a couple of us now, but that's not been the story of the last months for us.
Now, definitely, in this last month towards release, things are tenser because it's just a lot of stuff that has to come together, and it's very hard to do that nine-to-five. But until a couple of months ago, I think the average [overtime] was ten or twenty minutes, or something like that.
It's typically always the same teams. It's going to be code because there's stuff that just pops up. Content is done, it's not that we're still creating - well, there's some things, there's touch-ups and stuff like that. But this is not the same [situation] we had in the past. For previous games, we crunched definitely much more than we did now.
Do you actively guard against crunch - are you on the lookout for it?
I think the team as a whole guards against it, but necessity sometimes happens. It's the unforeseens, it's the things that you don't expect. When you have this much content, things go awry at places where you don't expect them, and at certain moments, you don't have any choice any more, where you have to say, 'OK well we need to do this otherwise we're not going to manage - we don't have any other options on this.'
So there is certainly that happening, but not to the levels... My parents had a restaurant and in the summer, you work longer, and then in winter, you don't. We have some accidents and then we have to work to fix them, but it's very limited.
I'm interested in the idea of eras for studios, and you mentioned earlier, walking to the interview, that this was the last Baldur's Gate 3 event so you were coming to the end of your Baldur's Gate 3 journey now. There's a studio you remind me strongly of, based on where you're at right now, and it's CD Projekt Red when it released The Witcher 3.
I know there are specific differences but broadly speaking, you're around the same size as CDPR was back then, you're making an RPG and self-publishing it, you're European, and there's a similar level of hype surrounding what you're doing. Like them, you're on the cusp of a new era, I believe.
What do you think about that comparison?
I can understand why [you said it]. We certainly approached the RPGs from a different perspective, but I can see why you would see that similarity.
Do you feel like you're on the cusp of a new era, as though things are going to change after Baldur's Gate 3 is released?
This depends on how Baldur's Gate 3 will do! I don't know this.
This game should not be made, right? It's what people call 'the classic RPG' - although I'd disagree with that - with triple-A production values on top of it. Nobody's actually really done that, so we don't know [how big] our market is, and we don't know what it's going to do, so we'll have to see. And that will define what we can do afterwards.
For CDP, Witcher 3 was a huge success. That allowed them to do things like Cyberpunk [2077], and I know that had difficulties but it was still an incredible endeavour and thing that they delivered. So you don't know how that's going to go, so it's very hard to make those parallels. But certainly historically, yeah, I can see why you would draw this connection.
How much do your plans for the future depend on the commercial reaction to Baldur's Gate 3? I'm sure you have things in place now already, but how much does that change depending on if the game sells well, or if it sells phenomenally well?
I know what we want to do - we had six years to sit on other ideas - but we need to see if there's a market large enough to carry this type of game. And if there is, then we can continue innovating in it, and if there's not, then we have to shift gears somewhere. That's something you can't know upfront.
OK. I'm now going to jump back in time because for me, this whole era you're in begins with Divinity: Original Sin 1. But the studio began way before then, back in 1996. That's two years before Baldur's Gate 1 came out, which means you were making games at the same time.
That's correct actually, yeah.
What was it like back then? Who were you at the time and what was the dream when you started the studio?
Well we were working on a game called The Lady, the Mage, and the Knight, which was really [Divinity: Original Sin 1]. It's as simple as that.
Oh!
The Lady, the Mage, and the Knight was named that because you started in three separate locations with three different characters that you could control independently or as a party, and multiplayer. And it had all the freedoms and systemics of Ultima 7, which is essentially what we're still making. But it turned out that was fairly complicated to make so we had to take a step back, and go step by step. But that's always been the idea behind it: get the freedom of a world and environment that reacts to you in a very reactive manner, and give you the toolbox of pen-and-paper and make that approachable.
And this came from what - a love of pen-and-paper or of Ultima 7?
Ultima 7.
That's like 'the game'?
That's the game. Everybody has this game that defines them. I played Ultima 6 - it was my first real RPG, and that was still with a lot of text on the sides. And then Ultima 7 was the first modern RPG in my eyes. It had a shit combat system [but] so much freedom and so much interactivity - so much, in fact, I had no clue what I was doing. I just knew this was cool.
You must have talked to Richard Garriott in the past.
I have not! I have never met him.
Wow! That is a meeting that should happen.
Anyway: The Lady, the Mage, and the Knight was cancelled. Was that an issue with the publisher?
No. So the publisher back then was basically self-publishing, so they were a developer. They were making the Realms of Arkania series, which was published by Sir-Tech in the US but they were Attic Entertainment in Germany. So they started self-publishing and they published a number of games that didn't work out, which drained down the money so they ran out of money.
After that happens, Larian takes a turn towards more action role-playing games like Diablo. Why do that if you wanted to make things like Ultima 7?
That was the publishers and distributors - there was absolutely no way you were going to get a publishing deal if it wasn't like Diablo. Even LMK could have come out but we were forced to move it 16-bit because Diablo was 16-bit. I had an agent back then. He said, "Not going to happen." If you say "action" the numbers go times ten. If you say "turn-based": not happening.
I suppose that ties into what you're nervous about now - how big the market for turn-based can be, versus action.
Well, I know the market for turn-based is very, very large because most people play turn-based on their phones.
That's a good point.
The thing is, of course, they have this thing in their heads which is shaped by games of old, and is not necessarily applicable to modern games.
This is a Dungeon & Dragons game. A lot of people know Dungeons & Dragons, even if it's just at the baseline. They understand I get an action, a bonus action, I do this and off you go. BG3 takes you by your hand and lets you do that.
We see a lot of playtesters say, "I don't understand everything that's going on but I'm enjoying it," and that's really what you need to do, because then you get into it. And in that sense it's easy to learn, hard to master, because there's a lot of systems active. You generally see when people try something out that they don't expect to work, and the game says 'yeah of course that works', that's when you get them.
I started playing in a regular D&D group around the same time Baldur's Gate 3 hit early access (in autumn 2020), so it's interesting to come back to BG3 now and see it from a slightly different perspective. And BG3 is now influencing how I play D&D, and vice versa.
Anyway, there's a lot that happens at Larian in the years leading up to Original Sin 1, but I'm going to skip over them to get to what I see as a turning-point for the studio. It felt like when DOS1 was being crowdfunded, in particular, a switch had flipped inside Larian, inside you maybe, and you were determined to go turn-based at long last.
It was before. It was when we got the rights back for Divinity 2 that the [switch flipped]. That's when I said, "No, I've had it." We'd tried multiple times with third parties and we listened to them every single time, and we had to learn that it was important that we took our own fate in our own hands. And since then, things have been going on the upside for us.
I was reading somewhere that you said the budget for DOS1 was actually bigger than the studio could afford at the time, so you had to delay a tax payment in-
I did, yeah. [Laughs]
In the hope that the money would come in.
Well I knew that that money was going to come in, so it was just going to be a month later.
It sounds like that was a big bet. Did it feel like one?
Well, it was a big bet. So what happened then was we had a number of distribution deals but they were only based after the fact, so the game had to come out before that money would come in. The Steam payments are also delayed in time when you receive the money, so it was that kind of thing. This was why I was so angry, because I went to talk to the tax authorities and said this money is coming, give me a break. And they usually do.
And they said no?
And they said no, because we just ran into 'the one guy'. That's why we were so upset about it because it shouldn't have been an issue. And for us as a studio, it's true: at that time we said 'everything - it's all in on this', because we also believed in it very strongly. We knew what we were making, we knew it was unique, and we also had our community already - we saw in early access this game is going to do well.
There was a thread from Paradox and someone said in an interview that "whatever you do in pre-orders, you can do times-ten", and I was looking at our pre-orders and was like, "Holy shit." So I came home, I told my wife; I said, "If that's true then this is going to change everything for us." And it was true; it was more than ten times.
Was that the point you knew things had changed for Larian?
The release of Original Sin 1? That was the big breakthrough. DOS1 was the big change.
I was amazed looking back that only 46 people made Original Sin 1. You're ten times that now.
Yeah. So Original Sin 1 was more systems-focused, and the narrative was really made almost on the side. And then with DOS2, the change was 'we're going to make the narrative good now'. That's what I meant with the different approach in growth to CDP.
And if DOS1 hadn't worked, would you have had to close?
I don't know - it's a very hard question because history went in another direction. We wouldn't have had any reserves left. I honestly don't know. That would have meant work-for-hire again, which was really what we didn't want to do. We actually stopped during DOS1, so thank god it worked.
Have you made any similarly big bets since then?
It's also a hard question. Yes, but in business there's always going to be these risks that you have to take, otherwise nothing's going to happen. If you work with one publisher, will they pay, will they go under? That's the publisher story we had. When you work with players that buy your game directly, you have more certainty that at least somebody is going to pay, but you're not sure if it's going to appeal - you don't have that guarantee, so there's that risk in there. So those are always big bets.
The only certainty that you have in this industry - and this is between huge brackets - is release many games and assume that one of them will be successful, and that one will pay for the rest. It's like the music industry in that sense, or the movie industry - it's not very different. So there will always be big bets made on a game. BG3 is a big bet, we've put a lot into it. So if it fails, well, then we'll have to go back to the drawing board and figure it out.
I don't think it will.
So, Divinity: Original Sin 1 comes out, it's successful, and it starts this new chapter for Larian. Now, after it comes out, you announced that you were making two games. One of them was Original Sin 2; what was the other one?
We were making two games... DOS2... What was the other game? We had many projects that we then cancelled. I have to remember. I don't remember. Was this after DOS1?
Yeah. It was 2014.
I don't remember. It must have been something small that we thought was going to be bigger and then it didn't materialise. There's been a lot of those. I mean there's always little things that you try out, sometimes bigger.
Any that you can talk about?
Well, Fallen Heroes. We announced that we closed it [put it on hold indefinitely]. That didn't work out.
Is that gone for good, then?
Yeah, it's gone for good.
And there's one that you never knew about - I can tell you that. Soul for Frost Island was the code name. It was a separate game based on DOS2. It got quite far in development.
What did you do in it?
It was DOS2 with new mechanics. I'm not going to tell you what the mechanics are because we're going to reuse them for something else at some point, but it was its own story, it was fairly far in advancement, and we killed it in favour of something else.
It's very hard to make multiple games at the same time. It's the next big step essentially, figuring it out. We've tried it multiple times, we've failed multiple times. The funny thing is that we used to do it when we were doing work for hire, we did all our games at the same time, so it's not that we don't know how to do it. But who knows? We'll see if we're successful with the next one. We'll be a little bit more careful in announcing it.
Was the development of Original Sin 2 quite straightforward? From my point of view, it seemed to be.
It was and it wasn't.
What was straightforward was the mechanical component, because we knew really well what we wanted to do, and we made the right decisions from the get-go. The narrative component was the big innovation in DOS2. Origin stories - being able to play as an origin character - that have multiple perspectives on the story. DOS2 was a much denser storyline, also, which was very free, which we wanted to do. That was the hard part about it. That's where most of the grey hair comes from.
As a world, as a development, there were some technical changes that we did. We went to [physically based rendering], but it was fairly straightforward. Also, the development line was much shorter compared to previous games.
Now, you told me once, a few years ago, that you actually pitched Baldur's Gate 3 to Wizards of the Coast in 2014, around the time DOS1 finished. We talked a bit about this before but what kind of pitch was it - was it an informal conversation, was it a formal email?
It was an informal conversation. It was literally, "Hey guys, we should be doing this. This is DOS1. What do you think?"
[And they said:] "Oh, ah, nice to meet you."
But they remembered. They remembered because when they then pitched it back to me, several years later, it was a carbon copy of what we had talked about.
So when you pitched it to them, did you pitch an idea or did you just say "I'd love to make BG3"?
Heh. I had a lot of arrogance, if you want. I said, "Look, we're the company to do this - look what we just did. You should give it to us."
They looked at me like, 'Who is this alien...?" And they were right.
Did you know them quite well at the time?
[Laughs] I didn't know them at all!
Oh!
It was actually funny that you mentioned CD Projekt: it was the people at GOG who introduced me. That's how I got to them.
So, yeah, I went before. That didn't go anywhere. But then around DOS2, while we were still developing DOS2, they came back. It was before DOS2 because one of our first milestones [on BG3] was just the week before the release of DOS2. So we had to draft the first story by then.
And when they came back to you, what did they say? Were they like, 'Hey, I don't suppose you remember...'
They asked if I was still interested and then they invited me to Seattle, and then I went to - I always call it an obscure bar but really it was just a regular downtown Seattle bar. And they had these big A3 papers - I still have them somewhere - where they had printed out the presentation they wanted to do to their board, and that was the blueprint of what we had talked about. And so with a few changes-
So you had talked to them about an actual idea for the game?
Yeah. Yeah.
What was the idea? What was that initial pitch?
It was basically using the Divinity engine and then putting Baldur's Gate - the entire world of the Forgotten Realms - on top of that, and putting the Player Handbook in it. It was essentially what we did with BG3.
It all sounds so simple.
I had this discussion with a developer. We were discussing the scope of this game, like, "It's really simple: you take the DOS engine, you take the Player Handbook, you make a great story, you make it cinematic - that's the vision. How hard can it be?" [Laughs]
It's good if you can summarise it in one phrase, what you're trying to do - it helps maintain focus. But that's really what we wanted to do: make a cinematic RPG that has the freedom we had for the DOS games, that you can play in multiplayer.
What I don't think people here [at the event] realise is that all the cinematics we saw: that was a dragonborn but you could have been a gnome. You could have been with two [companions], or one. It's crazy.
I did appreciate your dragonborn walking around with his top off so we could see his scaly six pack.
[Laughs]
And I thought it was hilarious when you went on a date and both characters sat there in what looked like their underwear.
That's because of the clothes of the Dragonborn [was wearing] and you can modify that. But the fact that the dragonborn is sitting there and holding a menu, with his big, big hands, and then a gnome, with very small hands and very tiny height has to be in the same scene, and their chin probably doesn't even get to the table. The cinematic team solved all of those problems. And that's systems-driven, multiplayer-driven cinematics - I don't know what to call it! It's just insane.
So Wizards of the Coast takes the pitch to the board and it gets the green light and-
No - it took a year. It took a year before we actually signed a deal.
So in that year you have a small team at Larian talking about what the idea for the game is?
Only after we signed, because before that, we didn't tell anybody. So we negotiated for a long time to see if this was going to come together or not. At some point, a deal is struck and there's a very small core [team working on it], who has been posting pictures now, victoriously [laughs]. I was there because there's pictures of us sitting in a hotel room in Seattle, writing what became BG3.
Did the idea come quickly for the story?
Yep - it was on the flight from the Quebec studio to Seattle, browsing through Volo's Guide [to Monsters] and seeing that picture of the tadpole being put in the eye.
No way!
I kid you not, that was it.
We walked into the room with them and said, "What do you guys think of mind flayers?" And they looked at me and said, "Mind flayers? It's always mind flayers!" It was pretty cool.
It's a great opening to the game. I love it when you don't have to explain someone's motivation to them. You've got something in your head and you need to get it out - it doesn't need explaining.
My thoughts exactly. I said that will instantly engage you. Because "you're the chosen one"... OK, I'm the chosen one [he says it as if he doesn't sound convinced]... But no - "I'm dying - I'm turning into a monster!" OK I get that.
And it can be anyone - that's the cool part about it. It allows you to get any role in there. You're fucked because you've got this thing in your eye, and that joins you to a whole bunch of people who distrust each other. They can come together because that is their common goal, to get this thing out of my eye.
Were there any ideas for the game back then that didn't make it, that didn't work out?
Yeah, there were.
Can you say what any of them were?
No, not really [laughs]. I can't.
So while this is going on, Original Sin 2 comes out and does very well. Can you talk about how many copies those two Divinity: Original Sin games have sold?
I actually don't know on DOS1. It's a lot. DOS2 is more.
[Laughs] Can you be more specific?
You're going to quote me so I don't want to say a quote which is not true on this.
I want to say, but I'm not sure if it's true, that DOS2 sold three times DOS1. 'Many millions' is the real answer. Enough to sustain something like BG3 and allow us to develop it.
And when I look at BG3 in early access: it's got nearly 60,000 'very positive' reviews on Steam, which is the kind of number usually reserved for the most popular games on the platform. It suggests it has sold an awful lot of copies. How does its success compare to DOS2 - is it an order of magnitude higher?
Oh vastly, yeah. It's vastly more successful than DOS2. You can't compare it. I think it's five-times in early access, if not more. I don't know the numbers by heart - it sounds crazy but it's true. But it's much, much, much more successful than DOS2 was in early access. But that's normal because a lot of people now trust the company, trust the type of gameplay that we bring, so they converted early on.
But no, BG3 is way more successful as an early access title. We will figure out if it's going to be way more successful after, then we'll be happy. But I don't know.
So I have a couple of bitty questions about the game (it's here that we talk about the Xbox Series S split-screen co-op dilemma, and how and why the game has 170 hours of cinematics). I really liked the dating feature we saw today. Can you go on dates with everyone in the game?
So all of the companions that are origins [who have origin stories] you can go on a date with. There are also companions who are not origins - there's two of them that you can, well, it's not always dating. For everybody, it's a different story. But you can romance them. There's only actually two that you can't romance.
And can you go on more than one date with a companion, or do you just have one?
No, no. So the romance is across the entire game. Some people are more open and faster, others will take their time. Others bifurcate depending on where their storylines land. There's quite a lot of actually - there's quite a lot of romance in the game.
I've read that the level-cap in the game is 12. Is that correct?
Yeah.
Why stop there?
Hah! It's enough [laughs]. We have over six hundred spells and actions! In DOS2, we had two-hundred and fifty. It's enough [laughs].
It's also that the pacing is correct. We actually increased it for pacing reasons; now, the pacing is as it should be, so it's sufficient.
I suppose it gives you room to extend it, potentially...
Everybody tells me that! But that's god-like levels and it's like, how do you make an RPG with these things? It's insane.
Because you can't contain people, I guess.
No - that's it. And you don't want to put them on a railroad because we're not that type of game. So I don't know, actually. I would have to think very hard, together with the team, on how to do that.
If you wanted to make another Baldur's Gate game to follow this one, would your agreement with Wizards allow it?
I can't talk about that. I can't talk about the agreements [smiles].
Would you have to pitch again?
I really can't talk about that. But I think Wizards is very content with what came out of BG3. You can ask them but I think they're going to be quite content.
OK and finally, to come back to that CD Projekt analogy from earlier: after The Witcher 3, CDPR doubled in size to get Cyberpunk 2077 out. I guess from their point of view, they couldn't shrink and do less than they did with their previous game, and it probably wasn't enough to stay the same. Where do you sit with this kind of consideration - do you feel like after BG3 you have to do more, and get bigger?
Actually there's a strong push within the company now to consolidate in size, because we grew much more than we wanted to.
Oh I see.
We didn't want to grow this much but we had to because this game required it. What we wanted to do was cinematic, triple-A, storytelling RPGs driven by systemics and multiplayer - it's always the same. It's what we want to do. We're getting really good at it.
We didn't expect that we needed so much to be able to do it. Nobody expected, like, lighting people or sound people. You're making a movie, right - you're making a lot of movies - in this case one and a half times all the seasons of Game of Thrones. That's a lot of movies that have to be made. But you need everybody that you need on a movie set. That's a lot of people. That's where that comes from.
At the same time, we wanted to increase the choice, so all teams grew much more than we wanted them to. We didn't expect this growth. So now we want to manage it. We want to consolidate a bit so that we can focus, and then we'll see.
I'm not going to say what the future plans are going to be; they're going to be defined by the success of BG3, defined by the needs of the next game, because each game has its language that you need to learn to talk it. Maybe we'll make a game like Into the Breach - who knows? [Laughs]
On that point: you've found a lot of success with turn-based games. Does that now define what you do - are you a turn-based developer?
Yeah. Ask me my favourite games-
Would you ever push out of that?
Yeah for sure. I like a lot of things. But I'm never going to say no to a turn-based combat system because I like them a lot, I think they're a lot of fun. They work really well. They're much more approachable.
I think if anything I would like to... Never mind, I'm not going to say that!
No - finish your thought!
[Laughs]
But it's not the be all and end all. It's got to be good. I don't want to make a combat system that's 'oh it's like that game'. If it doesn't have all the freedom and the systems, and it doesn't allow you to express the identity of your character, then I probably wouldn't like it. If somebody already did it exactly the same, I wouldn't want to do it either. So it would have to be something new, which is hard in real-time - I don't actually know how we would do it.
So as a final question: do you have a 'next thing' that you're working on at the moment?
Yes.
[Laughs]
Good. Well there we go!