The Belgian studio had three plans, and only one of them came to fruition when they got the rights to license Baldur’s Gate from Wizards of the Coast… but what would have been the other idea for Swen Vincke and his team?

The latest issue of EDGE magazine features a retrospective interview on Baldur’s Gate 3, one of the most outstanding games of recent times. Here, Vincke reveals what the team would have done if they didn’t have Baldur’s Gate, which is based on Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). The answer is a big surprise, because we weren’t expecting it:

“Baldur’s Gate is one of those IPs that you know a lot of people want to work on, so it would be great to bring other people into the studio. I felt like there was a glass ceiling that we couldn’t break unless we had triple-A production values, budget, marketing, all the triple-A stuff. It would have been Ultima, it would have been Fallout, it would have been Baldur’s Gate. There was not much to choose from,” Vincke said.

Ultima is the least relevant of these IPs, as Ultima IX was released 25 years ago (1999). But Fallout might have been a surprise! After Bethesda acquired the rights in 2004, we saw only first/third-person action RPGs in the franchise, while the style of the first two installments (computer role-playing game, or CRPG) was abandoned, and fans of Fallout 1-2 didn’t like the change. Despite pleas for Bethesda to lend the IP to someone else, with one exception (Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian Entertainment) this has not happened, and despite the success of the first season of Fallout on Amazon, Todd Howard and his team still refuse to let go of the reins.

Larian finally got Baldur’s Gate, but it wasn’t easy. The studio agreed to send Wizards of the Coast a detailed design document for Baldur’s Gate 3, but the initial concept didn’t sit well with the D&D owners: “It was really bad. But we didn’t have the brainpower to deal with it because we were trying to make Divinity Original Sin 2. Wizards sent it back with the corporate equivalent of ‘This is really sh_t’. And we were like, “We know, but we’re releasing a game – don’t ask us to do this now. Give us an extension. Luckily they understood and we got another chance,” Vincke added.

Fortunately for us, the original Fallout CRPG style has been picked up by others: inXile Entertainment’s Wasteland 3 is a great example, but you could also mention the two Atom RPGs, or Encased…

Source: WCCFTech