Developers behind Baldur’s Gate 3 hope the game’s success leads to more weirdness in the RPG space.
Larian Studios’ latest almost needs no introduction following the towering player numbers and fresh game of the year wins at the Golden Joysticks and The Game Awards. But such mammoth success is normally followed up with mammoth impact - and Larian’s staff have different hopes for the genre’s future.
“I want to see people go off on all kinds of weird tangents, trying to look for how we improve this,” says lead systems designer Nick Pechinen in an interview with GQ. Lead writer Chrystel Ding, on the other hand, reckons it would be “really nice to play a game like this where I don’t know the ending.”
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Head of production David Walgrave explained: “During the ‘90s, it felt as if turn-based was not cool anymore. When we started with the Kickstarter for [Divinity: Original Sin] publishers had been telling us for a decade, ‘This is never gonna sell.’” That’s an issue that writing director Adam Smith hopes will change, especially after Baldur’s Gate 3’s commercial success.
“I hope [Baldur’s Gate 3] kicks the doors open,” Smith says. “If you look at the indie space, RPGs never went away. People can go to a publisher and say, ‘Well, look what it fucking did for them.”
We certainly won’t see Baldur’s Gate 3’s impact hit for a few years (games don’t come quickly, after all), but we have already heard attitudes toward the genre shift. Obsidian’s Josh Sawyer recently joked about Xbox wanting a third Pillar of Eternity game following Larian’s success, for example. The RPG veteran is at least open to the idea, as long as the budget matches Larian’s.
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