After Baldur’s Gate 3, the Belgian studio has two new original IPs and projects in the pipeline, and their CEO claims that they will be of an even higher standard than the title that won them numerous Game of the Year awards (most recently at BAFTA).

The developers recently revealed what they will be spending their time on in the near future. It’s risky to focus on new or original IPs, but the situation could be improved by using the early access model that worked for Baldur’s Gate 3. Based on their comments, we should continue to look for RPGs based on immersion and choice to see what direction Larian Studios takes:

“As an independent studio since 1996, we value the freedom to follow our creativity wherever it leads. In this case, after six years in the Forgotten Realms and much discussion and deliberation, we’ve decided to take the opportunity to develop our own IPs. We’re currently working on two new projects and couldn’t be more excited about what the future holds. It’s still early days – we’ll tell you more about them later. But know that even as our focus turns to these new games, the sensibilities that brought you Baldur’s Gate 3 are alive and well here at Larian Castle.

We’re fueled by the same fire in our bellies that drives us to create immersive experiences shaped by your choices, and we can’t wait for you to join us on this next adventure. I don’t know if we’ll make it, but looking at our narrative, visual, and gameplay plans, I think what we’re working on now will be our best work yet. I get excited like a kid when I see the key visuals, want to show them to everyone right now, and grumble in frustration that I’m going to have to wait until it actually works. Yes, it’s hype, but it’s hype because it really looks and feels good,” said Swen Vincke, who runs the studio. So are they going to make a BETTER game than Baldur’s Gate 3?

In an interview with Gamesindustry, Vincke also talked about how he tried to avoid too much overlap with Starfield (Baldur’s Gate 3 was released on PC in early August, Todd Howard’s game a month later) and how much he respects Bethesda Game Studios: “I have a lot of respect for Bethesda… If you’re out at sea and a bigger boat comes by, the rule is you go out of the way for the bigger boat – they were the bigger boat. We went out of the way for Bethesda, but we still wanted the world to pay attention to us. We had a lot of narrative-heavy permutations, so we wanted to show that the game was very much about identity and how that identity was reflected in the game. We were also a much more cinematic game. Immersion gameplay was similar in terms of what our ambitions were.

I think those first three were definitely highlights of what we wanted to focus on. I expressed a strong desire to the teams not to grow. The teams have told me in great detail why we need to grow, so there’s that battle going on right now. I’m actually the one trying to hold them back. And they have legitimate reasons why they want to grow, because they have ambitions that they need to achieve, so we’re trying to keep it reasonable,” Vincke added.

Larian had fifty people working on Divinity: Original Sin. That number has tripled for the sequel. For Baldur’s Gate 3, they tripled that number, with a total of 470 people across their seven studios around the world. No wonder they have two projects going at once…

Source: WCCFTech, WCCFTech, Gamesindustry