Baldur’s Gate 3 was hardly a blip on my radar in July of 2023. One month later, when it was published, it quickly rose to the top of my all-time favorite games.
The game is currently commemorating one year of its launch. In anticipation of the game’s upcoming seventh major patch, which will allow for official modding support and new endings, developer Larian Studios has created a brand-new YouTube channel to offer behind-the-scenes glimpses at the game and its creators. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a game worth celebrating because of its critical acclaim, multiple accolades, and commercial success, but its quick ascent to fame surprised the Larian developers as much as the gaming community.
Regarding the success of the game, game director Swen Vincke says, “At every single point, I thought it was going to stop.” “I recall a disagreement with our publishing director, who stated, ‘This is going to sell a lot.'” “That’s not possible,” I answered. You claim that a certain quantity is simply not achievable.”
Although we conducted the interview online, Vincke takes my call from the passenger seat of a moving automobile while I’m at home in my office. Since he’s the only one who can hear me, he alerts me to any possible background noise from the car’s backseat, which is occupied by some other devs who contributed to the game. I’m not sure exactly where they’re going, but scheduling an interview during their commute makes one thing very evident: Vincke is a busy man, but he’s not yet ready to discuss the project that consumes all of his time.
A Series Revivified
Larian isn’t as excited about Baldur’s Gate 3 as he once was, which makes sense given that the game took six years to develop. However, it was precisely this excitement that first motivated Vincke to explore the concept back in 2017. Hailed as BioWare masterpieces from the late 1990s, the original Baldur’s Gate titles were developed by Larian, who thought it appropriate to carry on the heritage after decades without a new game. The Baldur’s Gate IP owner, Wizards of the Coast, agreed to a pitch meeting; however, the presentation date coincided, somewhat ironically, with the release date of Larian’s then-upcoming game, Divinity: Original Sin 2. Vincke claims that the lack of time resulted in a poor presentation.
Vincke laughs and says, “I’m still ashamed for it,” remembering the first pitch meeting. Whatever it was that Vincke presented to Wizards of the Coast was subpar.
Roles With Advantages
The actors themselves are, of course, the ones most affected by screenplay revisions, but in my conversation with Lae’zel’s actress, Devora Wilde, she recalled being appreciative of the additional labor. “I felt very lucky in the beginning to, as an actor, have a job for such a long period,” she recounts. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m gonna have a job for two years.'” Those two years would stretch to four due to production delays, thus Wilde spent a significant amount of time both with recurrent work and in virtual Lae’zel’s shoes.
On August 3, 2023, Baldur’s Gate 3 was eventually released, although it took a few weeks for Wilde to fully experience the game’s effects. There was a good deal of online traction from her TikTok posts and a video of the actors reading hungrily through tweets, but she didn’t realize the actual scale of the fan base until MCM London Comic Con. The game’s Shadowheart character, Jennifer English, had the same sentiments.
“I’d gone to London Comic Con when the game was in early access and I remember being honored that I had 10 people in my queue,” English recalls. “I believe I paid my rent for the weekend. And I thought, “Whoa, that’s incredible.” Her queues had stretched to six hours by the time she returned the next year, and the cast needed a security force to deal with the volume of individuals who were stopping them on the show floor.
The Next Campaign
English is not the only one at Larian who feels this way; everyone has been greatly impacted by Baldur’s Gate 3. It won Game of the Year at the Game prizes, Golden Joystick Awards, D.I.C.E. Awards, GDC Awards, and BAFTAs in the months that followed its debut. It also took home numerous additional prizes for acting and story, including the second Hugo award ever given to a video game. It is rated as one of the best role-playing games of all time and has an astounding 96 rating on Metacritic. Even with this enormous influence, Larian’s studio objectives are rather modest.
Art director Joachim Vleminckx emails, “All this success means there are high expectations of what’s next.” “We are playing it cool as always and we are not letting the success blind us to the amount of hard work it took to get here.”
