Larian Studios creative director Swen Vincke loves collaborative storytelling, especially when there’s room for it to be as silly and unconventional as possible.
Chatting with me after his GDC talk, “The many challenges of creating ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’”, Vincke and I started by sharing our desire to play video games with the our partners, whether direct or long distance. I told him that Original Sin 2’s online game allowed me and my partner to still have date nights even while living half a country apart. He told me his own affinity is why this feature exists in the first place.
“There is a split screen in [Divinity: Original Sin 1] then,” he said. “The only thing is that I never play it again because when I finish a game I get very sick and tired of looking at it. And so [my partner] say, ‘You don’t want to play it with me?’ So she played, and she still really likes it, but we never played it in split mode. But the intention was, this is something I want to be able to play with someone, and that’s why it happened. ”
Vincke comes from a small seaside town in Belgium, where he says the last thing people do is play Dungeons & Dragons, a game Vincke is fascinated with. With no easy access to manuals, he began to carefully read the manuals for the tablets available at the library and some computer games like the D&D-based Ultima series. Through them, Vincke realized that he wanted to make his own games just like that.
“It codified your creativity, your ability to come up with an adventure, go into it, come up with all the crazy crap, get over it,” Vincke said. “I’ll give you an example of the most powerful thing I’ve done with it. I have four kids, and so when we go long distances, I play D&D with them. I was sitting in front of the car and was saying, ‘Okay, you see a witch in the woods. What will you do?’ And so in my head, I roll the dice, and I cheat, and so we go on an adventure and we can pass hours this way… It makes them drop their iPads to not locked to the screen the whole time. And they have a lot of fun and it’s really cool… We do it with just the power of story and the power of dice. ”
In Larian Studios’ two-and-a-half decades of existence, he’s had plenty of opportunities to transition tabletop storytelling to the video game format through the Divinity series and other projects. But now, one of the most recognizable tablet-based role-playing games has fallen on Larian’s radar, and the studio’s desire to bring realistic tabletop storytelling to video games is proving to be the case. a profound challenge.
Vincke’s description Gate 3 of Baldur as a “dream project” for Larian, understandably so given its history. The first two Baldur’s Gate games were role-playing games developed by BioWare set in the familiar D&D campaign of the Forgotten Realms, and though there have been various expansions and enhancements since Baldur’s Gate 2 in 2000. , has yet to have a real third game until Now. Larian, with Divinity’s track record, seems like the perfect fit for Baldur’s Gate 3 and comes with the built-in advantage of an early access experience. Original Sin 1 and 2 both went through extensive and successful initial access, where Larian worked closely with the community to fix the wrinkles in the game.
As Vincke explains in his talk, Larian braced himself for the biggest match ever. The studio spent more than a year pre-production, hiring many new locations, and making the best predictions possible about how many words the game would have, how long it would take to shoot, what would happen to the game. create all cinematic, and much more.
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But it won’t be enough in the end, in no small part due to trying to transform the complexity of a Dungeons & Dragons game – where players can effectively do whatever they can think of. – into a video game system. .
“You will often hear, “Oh, you have to give the illusion of choice,” Vincke told me. “You know you really have to make realistic choices, or there will be no consequences, it doesn’t matter. And we have this dice maker, really ingrained, you’ll discover as you play. And so failure on dice, success on dice must be important. If they weren’t then you wouldn’t have the feeling that really all of this going on and all of these abilities of the character you’re leveling up has any impact on the game. ”
But creating that kind of system took even more work than Larian expected. Baldur’s Gate 3 requires all 12 D&D classes, all very different from each other, and all spells and abilities from D&D 5th edition must not only work, but also feel impactful in the world. .
One example Vincke shared is of a druid: for a while to make the gameplay footage work, the druid couldn’t talk to a cow, if the druid was already transformed into a cow. They must transform back into a human to talk to the cow. That makes no sense. Why can’t a cow talk to a cow? But fixing it requires a lot of cinematography to ensure all cinematic conversations with animals still work if a drug is transformed.
On top of such problems, there are multiplayer, multiple languages for the enormous amount of dialogue in the game, and the need for accessibility among all: a player who has never touched D&D before will can understand Baldur’s Gate 3.
With all this in mind, it’s clear to Larian that they can’t deliver the game they want to make with the team they have. It’s downsizing Baldur’s Gate 3, or massively expanding the studio to meet the challenge. So Larian has grown, jumping from 150 people to 400 people in a short amount of time. Larian has the resources to do so thanks to how well-selling Original Sin 2 is, but the premium version comes with its own set of problems. Larian doesn’t have a process for too many people. The sheer volume of work, teams and individuals quickly reveal weaknesses in the way they work together that were previously unclear. And the COVID-19 pandemic certainly hasn’t helped matters either, with Vincke saying the company’s “fragmentation” due to the shutdowns “isn’t necessarily the best thing in the world to promote.” creation”.
Amid all these obstacles, came early access, where production almost stopped.
“Every week, we wake up and say, ‘Okay, this is the week we’re going to get this done [feature],” said Vincke. “And then at the end of the week nothing happened.”
At one point, Vincke wondered if Larian should have brought in Baldur’s Gate 3 early. For both Original Sin games, the advantage is clear: player feedback has made the game better, and they’ve built significant goodwill within the community. Larian wanted that for Baldur’s Gate 3 because of its complexity, but worried it was too big.
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“You put it into the early access community, you come back the next day, you see a lot of things that went well, you see all your bad design decisions exposed, design decisions your good that you don’t see anyone talking about, so you’re good,” Vincke said of early access. influence and when you have to lay out so many rules like we have to switch and figure out how people are going to understand them or not understand them, it’s a very, very useful tool to have.”
But Larian brought Baldur’s Gate 3 in early anyway. There are still some hiccups. The early access launch was pretty tough, and Larian had to make a lot of changes based on player feedback, though Vincke feels that ultimately made the game so much better. He admits it’s not fun to see critics publish scoring reviews of a game that’s still in development, though he admits they have every right to do so – Baldur’s Gate 3 was destroyed and sold for money.
But with a better view of what he should have done differently during the lead to get early access, Vincke insists he wouldn’t change his mind if he had to do it all over again. .
“I will definitely organize myself better than we did,” he said. “There were things that I didn’t expect to happen. But the benefits are clear… You can actually follow the path of why things are done based on the community discussions, the reactions you’ve seen, the analytics you’ve seen. . That’s the great thing about it. And you can’t do that – I really wouldn’t know how to do it without the community. I guess you have a team of thousands upon thousands of beta testers. But even then it wouldn’t be like that. “
Because of the early access community, Vincke says that Baldur’s Gate 3 can much better support the narrative fantasies Larian wanted to work on in the first place. It’s thanks to player feedback that they’re able to answer weird questions that haven’t been in design, such as can a bear climb a ladder? (Yes.) What about a deep rothé? (It can, Vincke says, and has a very funny animation.)
And it’s not just the silly campaign stories people share about D&D, Vincke says the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 means hearing as many stories as about me and my partner while playing the long haul or about people who feel their lives are better because they’ve gone through a period of prominence tell the story Larian has made for them.
“Walk around PAX and have people come up to you and say to you, ‘Hey, this is what happened to us and this has made all the difference in our lives. I was having a really bad time and I played your game. ‘ … Games matter and they can make all the difference. And if you make a good game, it can be more important than if you make a bad game. So success seems like your game is important to everyone and it makes all the difference. ”
Rebekah Valentine is an IGN news reporter. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
