Baldur’s Gate 3 Was So Huge, Larian Chose to Triple in Size Rather Than Shrink the Game

ign.com:

Larian Studios creative director Swen Vincke loves collaborative storytelling, especially when there’s room for it to get as silly and original as possible.

Chatting with me after his GDC talk, “The Many Challenges of Making 'Baldur's Gate 3'”, Vincke and I start out by sharing our mutual desires to play video games alongside our partners, whether in-person or long distance. I tell him that Original Sin 2’s online play allowed my partner and I to still have date nights even while living half a country apart. He tells me his own similar desire was why the feature exists in the first place.

“There's split screen in [Divinity: Original Sin 1] already,” he says. “The only thing was I never played it anymore because when I finish a game, I'm so sick and tired of looking at it. And so [my partner] said, ‘You don't want to play it with me?’ So she played, and she still really enjoyed it, but we never played it in split screen. But the intention was, this is what I would like to be able to play with someone, and so that's how that came to be.”

Vincke came from a small coastal city in Belgium, where he says the last thing people were doing was playing Dungeons & Dragons, a game Vincke was fascinated by. Without easy access to the manuals, he began perusing the tabletop manuals available at the library and a handful of computer games like the Ultima series based off D&D. Through them, Vincke realized he wanted to make his own games just like that.

“It codified your creativity, the ability to come up with an adventure, to play in it, to come up with all kinds of crazy shit, overcome it,” Vincke says. “I'll give you an example of the most powerful thing I did with it. I have four children, and so when we'd take long drives I'd play D&D