The critical and commercial success of Baldur's Gate 3, the singleplayer sequel to a decades-old RPG, has led to one unexpected outcome: the emergence of Larian CEO Swen Vincke as some sort of champion of sanity in the games industry.
Singeplayer is dead? Arrant nonsense! Wizards of the Coast hassling modders? Step back, fools! And following the release of Baldur's Gate 3's ginormous patch 8, which is really, properly, honestly the final major content addition to the game, Vincke's been on something of a victory lap before hunkering down on Larian's next big thing(s).
The common factor among all of Baldur's Gate 3's considerable post-release content is that, rather amazingly for a game that's done this well, none of it is paid DLC. The game's solitary piece of DLC is the Digital Deluxe Edition upgrade, which has some cosmetics and soundtrack and art, but every player who's paid for Baldur's Gate 3 gets the full experience.
It's not something that should be taken for granted, and in a new interview with Gamespot Vincke is asked about the studio's attitude towards DLC and why it ended up not doing any for Baldur's Gate 3, despite such massive success.
"It's boring," laughs Vincke, "is really the honest answer. We tried to be in the DLC business, talked about that with BG3… there's just no passion.
"I mean happy player, happy business, but you also need a happy developer for a happy player. What we're doing now makes developers way more happy."
Vincke is here talking about Larian's "crazy ambitious" next project, which everyone is "deep in the trenches" working on. Don't expect to see anything soon: this thing is years away from even a first look. The CEO then goes on to talk about there being an internal expectation to expand on Baldur's Gate 3 at one point, before Larian as a whole thought better of it.
"We heard it's what we were supposed to do, you know: huge game, huge hit and you're gonna make DLC this and DLC that and DLC there, the money's gonna pile up! You think 'yeah we'll just make some DLCs' but then the moment that we had some time to think you realise 'what are we doing?'
"Progressive insight is not a bad thing, so sometimes you go down the wrong path and then say 'fuck it, [let's] change course.' Pardon my French."
There are no real details yet on Larian's next game, other than that it will not be Baldur's Gate 4. The studio has two projects on the go, and one is an RPG codenamed Excalibur. Which all sounds very Arthurian and therefore right up my street, although apparently "it's not what you think."
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