Larian Studios has asked how much demand there could be for a new episode 23 years after Baldur’s Gate II.

Obsidian Entertainment (Pillars of Eternity) and inXile Entertainment (Wasteland) are not the only players in the cRPG genre, as Belgium’s Larian has also proved with its two Divinity: Original Sin (D:OS) games that they should not be written off. They’ve also gone up a level with their new game, with new studios in Gent, Quebec, Barcelona, Dublin, Kuala Lumpur, and Guildford, with ten times as many people working there as during the first D:OS’ development.

This expansion also impacts Baldur’s Gate III: 170 hours of cinematics, a two million-word script, and as Xbox’s senior technical program manager for accessibility summed it up, the scope is Rockstar-level non-sense, but the studio is not optimistic. The company’s Swen Vicke underlined this attitude in an interview with Eurogamer.

“This depends on how Baldur’s Gate III will do! I don’t know this. This game should not be made, right? It’s what people call ‘the classic RPG’ – although I’d disagree with that – with triple-A production values on top of it. Nobody’s done that, so we don’t know how big our market is, and we don’t know what it will do, so we’ll have to see. And that will define what we can do afterward. I know what we want to do – we had six years to sit on other ideas – but we need to see if there’s a large market to carry this type of game. And if there is, then we can continue innovating in it; if there’s not, we have to shift gears somewhere. That’s something you can’t know upfront. […] Baldur’s Gate III is a big bet; we’ve put much into it. So if it fails, we’ll have to go back to the drawing board and figure it out.

It’s vastly more successful than D:OS2. You can’t compare it. I think it’s sold five times more in early access if not more. I don’t know the numbers by heart – it sounds wild, but it’s true. But it’s much, much, much more successful than D:OS2 was in early access. But that’s normal because many people now trust the company and the type of gameplay we bring, so they converted early on. But no, Baldur’s Gate 3 is way more successful as an early-access title. We will figure out if it will be way more successful after, then we’ll be happy. But I don’t know.” said Vincke.

Baldur’s Gate III will be released on PC on August 3 and PlayStation 5 on September 6. The Xbox Series version isn’t dated yet because the Xbox Series S still has issues with split-screen co-op gameplay.

Source: WCCFTech