Baldur’s Gate III Interview – Swen Vincke on Early Access Feedback

With Baldur’s Gate III live in early access, Larian Studios is fairly open about their tracking of everything their players do during this phase of continued development. As such, we can now check out this IGN interview with the studio’s CEO Swen Vincke where he discusses some EA stats and talks about the inherent difficulty of trying to please everyone at once.

Here’s a couple of sample paragraphs to get you started:

One of the more difficult elements of developing Baldur’s Gate 3 with player involvement is that there are numerous different ‘camps’ of people interested in the game. There’s Larian’s long-term fans, who are crying out for there to be more ‘surfaces’ in the game (a mechanic used in the Original Sin games to create dynamic fire, poison clouds, oil slicks, and more). Then there’s players of the D&D tabletop game, who’d rather have surfaces removed all together. And then there’s old-school Baldur’s Gate fans, who want the real-time combat of the BioWare original games back. There’s a lot of people pulling in a lot of directions.

“I can imagine that we will never manage to find the balance that will please everyone,” says Vincke. But, there is a (sort of) solution: “The game will be moddable eventually, so people will be able to make their mods. I expect multiple flavors of Baldur’s Gate 3 to come out of that. Over time there will be probably a flavor that will appeal hopefully to everybody.”

But as for the flavour that the Larian team will create themselves? It’s actually closer to the general consensus of what players apparently want than you may imagine. “All of the things that people are suggesting were already on the list of things that we had to do,” says Vincke. “So they fit our roadmap. We are, to a large extent, in sync with our audience, I think. But there are things that we hadn’t thought of. So it’ll be interesting to see what they are going to add to the game.”