Baldur’s Gate 3 is done, and Larian is hard at work on future projects. Its next game, simply described as an “ambitious project” right now, is something CEO Swen Vincke has come out to say he “hopes to be able to talk about” in five years time.
This info, among nearly an hour of additional insight you should absolutely check out, comes from a video interview on GameSpot between the Larian CEO and Tamoor Hussain. While the interview covers all manner of topics, including AI, single player games, and more, information on what’s next for Larian is discussed at the start and end of the interview.
“I just came out of a meeting where I told people I painfully remember how much work it is to make a game, a big RPG” Vincke said when asked for an update on what Larian’s working on. “We’re deep in the trenches working on our next big thing. It’s shaping up quite well actually, but it’s crazy ambitious. There’s so much new things we can do these days so yeah, complex!
“On top of that, we’re trying to figure out how to make two games! So organizing ourselves for that also isn’t the easiest thing in the universe because we make complicated games with lots of permutations, lots of agency for players. So predicting when those will be finished is hard, and then organizing around that is harder. Keeping ourselves busy, really.”
By the end of the interivew, Hussain asks what the future looks like for Larian, asking where Vincke hopes the studio will be in five or ten years from now. To this, Vinke responded with the following,
“We’ve got an ambitious project, I’m not going to tell you what yet. I hope that definitely in five years from now I can tell you about it, to say ‘yeah, this is working out and this is what we’re doing’. We are in a position where we can craft multiple RPGs side-by-side rather than going idle.”
Vincke continued: “That’s actually the main reason why we’re doing multiple projects. We have this waterfall where we have this small group that starts thinking about what we’re doing to make, then this very large group that executes on it. Then when that large group is finished, if the people at the beginning aren’t ready, then everyone is fucked because everyone has to wait.
“So I hope I can tell you in five years that we’ve cracked it, we’ve figured it out, this is what we’re doing now. Here’s game one, we’re making this completely different thing: Game two. Then when game two is ready, we’ve got this entirely different thing that’s going to come. If we can make this work in a good way where we can enjoy our lives, that’ll be mission accomplished. In practice it’ll probably be miserable, and there’ll be plenty of stuff that goes wrong, but that’s the goal.”
Interviewer Tamoor Husain concluded jokingly by saying he hopes it isn’t five years before he and Vincke talk again, to which the dev laughs and responds: “My wife will divorce me if it takes five years (laughs)”.
So, what does all this mean for you? Well, while you probably won’t have to wait a full five years to hear from Larian again, you should settle in for the long haul in terms of actually getting your hands on a new game from the studio any time soon. This, ultimately, is a good thing. Baldur’s Gate 3 only became the monster hit that it was because Larian was willing to invest the time it needed, years-upon-years of work towards the Early Access release, then more years on top of that before the game’s 1.0 version.
Having recently beaten Baldur’s Gate 3 yet again, I say take all the time you need. Just, y’know, maybe throw out a teaser every now and again to keep us going!