Swen Vincke, CEO of Larian Studios, also spoke in an interview with Edge magazine about how Baldur’s Gate 3 winning so many awards was a huge burden for them.

Larian also had a studio in St. Petersburg, but it was closed in 2022 after Russia started a war against Ukraine. The Belgian team decided to move the workers there as soon as possible. The task was to get as many of them out of Russia as possible. So Larian fought with consulates and embassies, which resulted in 90% of the studio’s workers being evacuated, but a year and a half later, the change was still causing problems.

“I had already thought about what we would do if it actually happened. The decision was immediate: We can’t stay here. We had to move people out, because the way these things go, you can almost predict that there’s going to be a mobilization at some point, and that meant that my whole team was going to go to war. In a machine as complicated as an RPG, where everything is connected to everything else, if you suddenly start ripping things out, the whole thing collapses because things that were supposed to be done are not being done. You could see the ripple effect, which led to compromises and cuts in the final product. [It happens all the time, [but] it’s rare that you lose a studio in the middle of development,” Vincke said.

In 2023 and even in 2024, Baldur’s Gate 3 won a lot of awards, which is why Larian eventually decided to “rotate” the teams that would be sent to the awards galas: “It affects development – there are a lot of them. It was a real problem. It’s great that you have a moment of celebration…we still have award shows that we go to because they’re important, and we really appreciate it. [It would be cool if everybody could agree to do everything at the same time. It is surprisingly hard on the soul. We’ve all been more emotional because we can’t get closure. And you want closure at the end of a project.

This is not a common problem…

Source: PCGamer, PCGamer, GamesRadar, GamesRadar