Now that the long-awaited arrival of Patch 8 for Baldur’s Gate 3 has finally passed by, Larian Studios lead Swen Vincke has revealed developers are focusing on “making our next big thing as good as we can” – a new RPG he calls “crazy ambitious.”
The studio previously unveiled that it has two “very ambitious RPGs” planned after Baldur’s Gate 3, including one project codenamed Excalibur, but not much else has been said about the mysterious games to come. Speaking in a recent interview with GameSpot, however, Vincke opens up a bit more about the future now that Larian’s beloved 2023 RPG has been wrapped up with its massive final update.
Explaining that Larian is “deep in the trenches” on its “next thing,” Vincke jokes how he’s now “painfully remembered how much work it is to make a game or a big RPG.” Despite being a difficult undertaking, though, he calls the studio’s current game-in-progress “crazy ambitious” and admits it’s “shaping up quite well” already. As for the project set to follow, Vincke says it’s hard trying to organize working on two titles at once.
“We’re trying to figure out how we’re going to be making two games,” states the lead. It’s all the more challenging as Larian prides itself on crafting user-driven experiences with a lot of depth, so it’s “not the easiest thing in the universe, because we make very complicated games, lots of permutations, lots of agency for players.” He wouldn’t want the team to do it any other way, however, as too long a split between productions could spell problems.
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“We are in a position where we can craft multiple RPGs side by side so that we don’t have to worry about people going idle – that’s actually the main reason we’re doing multiple projects right now.”
It does make sense – especially when looking at recent situations like the reported layoffs across BioWare following Dragon Age: The Veilguard as its developers were apparently left with little work to do as Mass Effect 5 entered pre-production.
Despite the difficulties ahead, Vincke remains hopeful Larian can pull the two RPGs off – and then perhaps maybe even a third afterward, too. “I hope I can tell you five years from now, ‘We cracked it. We figured it out. This is what we’re doing now. Here’s game one. We’re making this completely different thing, game two, and when game two is going to be ready, we already have another thing that’s gonna come.'”
If the studio “can make that work in a really good way, that we enjoy our lives, that’s gonna be mission accomplished,” describes Vincke. “In practice, we will probably be miserable, and there’s going to be plenty of stuff that went wrong” – but the lead is optimistic that developers can take on both of their new RPGs, innovative ideas and all, and “executing them” as well “without killing ourselves” in the process.
There might be more to come of Baldur’s Gate 3 yet, too, despite Vincke saying Larian hoped for it to “go out with a bang” with Patch 8, as he teases that one can “never say never.”
If not, though, Dungeons & Dragons stans don’t need to worry – Hasbro is currently “talking to lots of partners” about the next Baldur’s Gate game and also has another shiny new D&D game in the works that stands separately from the series.
Baldur’s Gate 3 “changed design direction at least two times” after Larian first tried a “cartoony approach” with the RPG, “closer to what we see in D&D books”
