The long, winding road to Baldur’s Gate 3 was paved with these Larian games

digitaltrends.com:

A career-crowning achievement as monumental as Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t come out of nowhere. From Divinity to Dungeons & Dragons, Larian Studios has long been one of the loudest advocates for rich storytelling and true, meaningful freedom in Western RPGs.

Larian Studios’ story is a rags-to-riches tale about a group of passionate developers whose deep and diverse portfolio of games piled up for nearly three decades before Baldur’s Gate 3 ever saw the light of day. Amid canceled projects, Larian narrowly skirted total bankruptcy. In order to survive, there are several points in its history when the independent studio experimented. There were dives into real-time strategy, educational games for the Belgian kids’ TV station Ketnet, the Diablo-esque Divine Divinity, and Divinity 2: Ego Draconis, a third-person action RPG built on Bethesda’s Gamebryo engine.

It’s an eclectic list of projects that underlines a truth about the artistic process. You don’t build a masterpiece without some trial and error along the way, and Larian’s artistic journey proves that lessons can be learned in even the most unconventional places.

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The L.E.D. Wars (1997)

Larian Studios lost not one, but two publishing deals for its original RPG, tentatively titled Ragnarok Unless (later The Lady, The Mage, and The Knight) before ever successfully launching any game at all. According to Robert Zak’s 2019 interview of Swen Vincke, the Larian team ended up scrapping its original vision for a deep, co-op-capable, story-driven roleplaying game much like what we now see in Baldur’s Gate 3. Instead of diving right back into the roleplaying world, Vincke and the remaining Larian staff ended up doing work-for-hire projects for the Belgian government while working on their own real-time