• Interview
• Video

Larian CEO talks Baldur's Gate 3 development and challenges

CEO Swen Vincke also talks about the importance of Larian's independence, noting that it allowed the studio to take some wild chances.

Ozzie Mejia

September 20, 2023 3:00 PM

1

It's been a big summer for the team at Larian Studios. Baldur's Gate 3 came out of early access and its 1.0 release has stood out as one of the biggest games of the year. Larian brought Baldur's Gate 3 to PAX West, where we managed to catch up with CEO Swen Vincke and ask him about leaving early access, the challenges of reaching 1.0, the Dungeons & Dragons renaissance, and the importance of maintaining its independence and not being beholden to a large publisher.

"I don't think anybody in their sane minds would have made the decisions that we did," Vincke told Shacknews. "This game should not exist, in the sense that it was a very expensive game to make and it's in a genre that has not proven yet that it can sustain that type of investment. It's proven now, so I hope there's going to be a lot more RPGs. I was convinced that if you brought AAA values to the type of game that we were making with [Divinity: Original Sin 2], there was going to be a broad audience for it, even if it is a little bit hard to get into. Or at least people think it's hard to get into."

Vincke also discusses the game's visual style, motion capture performances, translating a deep pen-and-paper D&D experience into a video game, and much more.

Baldur's Gate 3 is available now on PC and PlayStation 5. It will release on Xbox Series X|S later this year, albeit with some slight differences between the Series X and Series S versions. For more interviews like this, check out Shacknews and Shacknews Interviews on YouTube.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?