DOWN BY THE RIVER

For the first anniversary of BALDUR'S GATE III, PC Gamer spoke exclusively to SWEN VINCKE about the past, present and future of Larian Studios

- Fraser Brown

It's early summer, almost a year since Larian launched Baldur's Gate III - a year in which the studio has collected a vast number of awards and accolades for its monumental RPG and the team has swapped the Forgotten Realms for the swelteringly hot Spanish city of Barcelona. Larian is here to discuss its next game behind closed doors.

A couple of days ago, on July 8, it held a summit to talk about kicking off a new RPG. "Lift off," as CEO Swen Vincke puts it.

There's the crackle of electricity in the air, not because a dragonborn sorcerer has just cast chain lightning, but because the team is about to set off on a brand-new adventure.

Larian's developers are now spread all over, including Dublin, Ghent, Warsaw and here in Barcelona, where so many of them have gathered. Much of the excitement, then, is also down to a lot of them being in one place, rather than distributed across the world.

It wasn't all that long ago that Larian was comparatively tiny.

"These are guesstimates," says Vincke, "but I think that Divinity: Original Sin 1 must have been around 40 people, and then Divinity: Original Sin 2 was around 120-ish. And now we're approaching 500." The new Warsaw studio has added a chunk, and Vincke says that it's "beefed up" QA, adding more internal playtesters to prepare for what's coming next.

So what is coming next? Well, that's a secret that Larian's not quite ready to share. Chatting to members of the studio following the summit, however, reveals a lot, from hints about the scope of its next two projects to why the team stopped working on what was shaping up to become Baldur's Gate IV.

LITTLE BIG DEVELOPER

Years ago, I visited Larian's Ghent studio for the conclusion of D:OS2's successful Kickstarter, and while it had grown considerably after D:OS1, it still had this small studio energy.