Swen Vincke, the head of Larian Studios, as well as director of Baldur’s Gate 3explained how he refused to sacrifice the quality of the game, even as financial and time constraints loomed ever larger. The result was a masterpiece, but the risks were enormous, including that of not getting to the end.
The opportunity to address the issue was the Digital Dragons conference in Poland, where we spoke about the path taken by the development studio to reach the end of the work and explained the problems encountered during construction.
Larian had stared at one standard very high before he was satisfied with the quality of Baldur’s Gate 3: “You could have something in your hands that you would rate, when reviewing, a score of 45% on Metacritic. So what would you do? You would say it’s not good enough, and you would do it again,” he said Vincke.
It often happened that parts of Baldur’s Gate 3 required changes in multiple places, with a relative waste of time and money, also considering the size of the game. At a certain point the development team started to think that it was impossible to complete it, given all the complications. There was still no talk of compromises in terms of quality, but Vincke had to change tactics to streamline the work: “We simply said ‘no, the game needs these things, so we’ll do them, we have to give it the right breathing space to bring it to the right level quality, because otherwise it won’t work.”
Vincke gave the example of the 9,500 cutscenes in the game, where each change would have required the developers to make many more changes. Despite the constraints dictated by the budget, the tactics employed by Larian overcame the problem and facilitated the quality control of the game, speeding up work.
What to add? Baldur’s Gate 3 is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series Unfortunately, Larian Studios will not be responsible for Baldur’s Gate 4, but it has some advice for those who will face the challenge.
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