Baldur’s Gate III – Swen Vincke Interview

Following about a year of early access, Larian’s CEO Swen Vincke sat down with GamesIndustry.biz to chat about Baldur’s Gate III. The resulting interview touches on working through a pandemic, dedicates a few paragraphs to Larian’s intentions with the whole early access thing that seems to be taking forever, goes over some of the game’s mechanics, mentions the resurgent popularity of CRPGs, and more.

Here’s an excerpt to get you started:

A lot of the work Larian is accomplishing with Baldur’s Gate 3’s early access actually revolves around accessibility and onboarding, and how you convey the complex rules of D&D in the simplest way possible.

“We have an entire group that’s working on this, so they’re getting new players that have never played a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 before, they’re doing tests trying to figure out what it is that we need to explain, because some of these rules are really complicated.

“You don’t want a game to be complicated, you want it to be very natural and very intuitive and so there’s a lot of work being done on the background that we haven’t shipped yet, where we’re trying to say: what is the best and easiest way for a player discovering this rule so that they intuitively take it into account? This early access is clearly obviously a very important platform for us.

“I think when you’ll see what we will release compared to where we started, you’ll have this feeling of: holy shit, this is very, very accessible, I don’t have to think about it, it just makes sense. And that’s exactly the experience you have if you play D&D in real life. If you have a good DM, they’re not going to bombard you with 300 pages of rules that you need to learn, they’re just going to be: hey, you enter a dungeon and there’s a door. What do you do?”