Larian after Baldur's Gate 3: "We have ambitions to make really good RPGs, and that's sufficient"
Last week, Larian's Baldur's Gate 3 won five BAFTAs, including Best Game and Player's Choice.
That's on top of GOTY accolades at the Golden Joystick Awards, The Game Awards, the DICE Awards, and the Game Developers Choice Awards. As GamesRadar+ pointed out, that makes it the first game to accomplish this grand slam since The Game Awards' inception in 2014. That's not even taking into account other wins like at the New York Game Awards, the Steam Awards, and of course being among GamesIndustry.biz's very own Games of the Year 2023 (and many other publications').
By now, there isn't a lot about Baldur's Gate 3's success that hasn't been said already. We'll try regardless.
We first talked to Larian about Baldur's Gate 3 in 2020, during a press trip showcasing the game for the first time. We met again in 2021, a year into BG3's extremely successful Early Access, and we noted how much had changed already.
Both times, the same core topics and ideas emerged from our conversations with CEO Swen Vincke though; Larian's healthy approach to growth, the importance of community in its development process, and how ultimately it was all about making decisions that would benefit the game.
A world has happened since these interviews. But as we sit with Vincke for the third time, it's clear that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The studio had a vision for its development journey, and it never strayed from it despite challenges. It just simply… went ahead and did it, without compromising its values and approach in the process.
"We did something new," Vincke says when chatting about BG3's success. "We put agency in cinematics at a level that hadn't been done before, and we didn't go out of the way trying to take shortcuts, although we did use a lot of tricks. But you can sense that the agency was real, I think. So that's a massive reason. We didn't deviate from that, even if we were facing development problems."
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