Swen Vincke, CEO of Larian Studios, spoke with PC Gamer at GDC 2022 about the current development of Baldur’s Gate 3. The game is a dream project for Larian, and Vincke says the firm wants it to be the definitive videogame representation of D&D 5th edition.
The benchmark incarnation of 5th Edition in a videogame. That’s what we’re trying to do. I think it’s already very good, and it’s still getting better.
This is a very specific niche of game where you have a lot of narrative with a lot of systems coming together. If your agency is [limited], you’re guided down the routes, you’re not gonna be happy when you’re playing it. It breaks the entire thing. The problem is the only alternative is just, fuuuuck, you need to cover it all. But we figured it out, and we’re doing it.
There were really lots of easy cuts that we could’ve done. But then it wouldn’t have been the game that it needs to be. We’re not going to release it if it’s not ready. It’s going to be quite the thing, you know. When you go to the character creation and you can select all those classes, all those subclasses, and then you start that journey—knowing everything you can do on that journey, it’s going to be quite the thing.
Larian, on the other hand, had to expand far more than it had planned in order to complete Baldur’s Gate 3. The studio presently employs over 400 people in its several offices in Ghent, Dublin, Saint Petersburg, Quebec, Kuala Lumpur, Guildford, and Barcelona.