Larain had 150 people at the end of Divinity Original Sin 2 and would have went bankrupt if the game did not succeed. They grew to the current size of 400. From Larian themselves
With one of the best RPGs of the decade under its belt, Larian then set out to make Baldur’s Gate 3. A year in pre-production let them build out estimates of how much work this even more ambitious game would take, hiring developers to work on fancy cinematics Divinity didn’t have. “We thought we had it all figured out. We even estimated how big we’d have to become,” said Larian founder Swen Vincke.
They were wrong.
“I never expected us to be 400 people to make BG3,” Vincke told me. “Nobody expected it. But it’s literally what we needed to do it. We had a choice. There was a moment where we started understanding what we needed to do to make this game. We thought we understood. Then we actually really understood. And so we had two choices: we could scale it down, or we could scale ourselves up. And so we chose to scale ourselves up.”
So it took a year just to plan out how many people they needed.
they have no desire to work with hasbro again and why split revenue when you have your IPS
Also, dnd rules are really hard to work with for a video game
1 Like
I know Swen also said they’re building up to something big, but that it wont be their next game.
I think he originally said it would dwarf BG3, but later walked that back a bit saying that the scope of BG3 was good enough.
look, I’m a big fan. Those guys took every risk and deserve every accolade
he actually said they have two games in the pipeline but both are years out. No one would be shocked if one the games is Original Sin 3
I doubt they’re that hard mechanically to work with, especially since Larian was open to some pretty loose interpretations of the rules or just using houserules, but it does make them limited in what they can do with the lore.
Which a studio that’s used to having full control over the IP may not like those limitations.
Definitely be buying ea on their next one too, they have my confidence lol
1 Like
Yeah I think pretty much everybody is expecting one of them to at least be a Divinity game, if not Original Sin 3. Swen even said that they’re definitely returning to their own world “at some point”.
I am curious about the other one though. Part of me would love to see Larian do something outside of medieval fantasy.
1 Like
they did say there was some issues converting pen & paper rules to video game although they seemed to do just fine with them
Which rule set does BG3 use? I would assume either 4E or 5E.
It uses 5e with some homebrew rules.
It seems to be standard with D&D games that developers use the latest ruleset. I assume it’s WotC policy as part of the license.
1 Like
That makes sense. I know nothing about the 5E rule set. Last D&D game I played was when 4E first came out. Was not a fan of that edition.
Yeah I never touched 4e. I got started on Pathfinder, and the general consensus I’ve seen from a lot of the tabletop community is “we don’t talk about 4e”.
As somebody who thinks 3/3.5/Pathfinder went kind of overboard and overly bloated the system with number crunching that mostly just serves to bog down combat, it’s a nice scaling back of those things will still allowing customization.
Though it does mean that it’s a more simple system.
Yeah, 4E was pretty much the complete polar opposite of 3.5 / Pathfinder. My opinion is that they swung too far in the other direction and made it too simple. Lots of customization got lost. I hear 5E kind of sits in the middle.
I’m not sure if it was in 4e but I think one of the better changes was replacing a lot of small bonuses with advantage/disadvantage where you roll twice and take the higher/lower result. Less number crunching, more rolling.
Also the addition of needing to concentrate on spells and only being able to concentrate on one at a time, reducing the whole “roll up into combat with 57 buffs” thing I remember in Pathfinder.
Playing Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous is still kind of annoying for that once you get past level 8-10.
I think some of that was taken out of context. What I read from that, and even what Sven later touched on was that BG3 was an anomaly because Larian spent the better part of a decade or two with the same employees, gaining knowledge and experience making the same game over and over, iterating on design alongside their gaming community. Not only is keeping talent impossible for AAA development, doing early access as a sort of open alpha for games will likely never be financed by the folks in charge. Thats the reason why, I believe.
The game doesn’t really have anything above average. Mid combat, terrible story, some of the worst dialogue. I’m super liberal and it goes way beyond “woke”
They’ve literally shoe horned terrible immersion breaking lectures on real world gender studies that don’t even exist in the DA universe.
People look at that glaringly while the rest of the game is just bad
1 Like
Do yourself a favour, buy it and play it before anything else.
1 Like