![]() When we started, we brainstormed together with the creative team about what the story was going to be. The first thing they did is they sent us a shitload of books and miniatures, and access to all of the geeky stuff that they have. There's quite a lot, so we try not to think about it," Vincke says. The franchise comes with two decades of lore and, to widen the scope even more, D&D is a 46 year old IP that's now so trendy even Vin Diesel and Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson play it. Of course Larian wanted to do it, but one does not simply make a Baldur's Gate game. And so he showed me a Power Point, which was exactly what we had been talking about - I still have it actually! And he said: I'm gonna show this to the board of Hasbro next week, do you still want to do it?" ![]() "That hit a nerve clearly, because many years later I got a phone call from Nathan Stewart, the head of Dungeons & Dragons, and he said: 'Do you want to come over to Seattle, I have something to show you'. "They didn't really react, but then we started talking with each other and so they asked me: 'What would you make?' and then I explained what you saw today. "I approached for the very first time after Original Sin, trying to explain to them that we should be the ones making Baldur's Gate 3," he says. There's a pure, almost childish joy in Vincke as he explains how Larian pulled this one off. One thing that's abundantly clear when meeting Vincke and the Larian team is the sheer passion they all seem to share for this universe. When I ask Vincke how he managed to get the very sought after IP, he bursts out laughing and replies: "I rolled a D20 and I won." The studio simply wouldn't have been able to realise its ambition without a decade of working on its own tech.Īnd Larian's dream of working on Baldur's Gate 3 has also been almost a decade in the making. It's been quite a job." Baldur's Gate 3 is shaping up to be a very cinematic experienceĪfter a decade of refinement, the Divinity Engine is now tailored to Larian's needs, powering the cinematic experience that Baldur's Gate 3 is shaping up to be. So it's 1.5 million words, estimated, of performance capture. We have two studios in London that are continuously motion capturing, because everything in Baldur's Gate 3 is performance capture. That turned out to be a much bigger challenge than we thought it was going to be. The big thing for the is the ability to do work cinematically. "It's ever evolving and it's dedicated to making RPGs and multiplayer. "We've been working on the Divinity Engine since 2011," Larian CEO Swen Vincke says. ![]() And this road to independence actually started with the engine it's using. The sixth entry in the series, Divinity: Original Sin, nearly bankrupted the studio despite a successful Kickstarter campaign.īut even in the darkest time, Larian was smart enough to keep pushing for its vision and to pave the way for its future success - a success that it was determined to build completely independently. An educational games studio for a while, it has invested body and soul in its Divinity franchise, which launched in 2002. Larian embodies the expression 'it takes years to become an overnight success'. It's been quite a job" Swen Vincke, Larian "Baldur's Gate 3 is 1.5 million words, estimated, of performance capture. That would be Larian Studios, of course, and needless to say the Belgian developer has come a long way since LED Wars. So what do an above-average real-time strategy game and what's arguably the best CRPG of all time have in common? Well, the developer of the former is working on the anticipated follow up to the latter. Bioware released an equally well-received sequel in 2000, Baldur's Gate 2. Based on a pen-and-paper Dungeons & Dragons campaign run by BioWare's James Ohlen, Baldur's Gate is still fondly remembered for its engaging but realistically flawed cast, its political plot, and its groundbreaking pausable real-time combat.īaldur's Gate also had technical prowess, balancing hundreds of thousands of assets when most games at the time only had a couple of thousand. To this day, it is still considered the cream of the crop within its genre. If you're unfamiliar with the game, a Google search will tell you that it's an "above-average real-time strategy game" that plays like a "low-cost alternative to Westwood's famous Command & Conquer series."Įxactly one year later, Baldur's Gate came out.
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