Summary
Larian Studios is hoping to follow upBaldur’s Gate 3with a “very ambitious” game within the next five years, according to studio head Swen Vincke in an interview withGameSpot.
It’s no secret that developing a triple-A game takes quite a long time. The days of major developers releasing multiple games annually are mostly behind us, unless your name is Obsidian Entertainment.
After releasing Avowed in February, Obsidian is set to release The Outer Worlds 2 later this year. The prolific studio could end up releasing five games in six years, a pace almost unheard of in modern triple-A development.
Vincke’s approximation is likely accurate: five to seven years seems to be what it takes for an ambitious triple-A title in modern game development. Certain titles, such as The Elder Scrolls 6 and Grand Theft Auto 6, take even longer.
Two-Game Strategy
Larian is currently working on two unannounced titles, a new direction for the studio, which has exclusively worked on one game at any given time until now. The objective of this new strategy is to reduce the number of developers idling between projects and to smooth out the inertia caused by jumping from one project to the next.
It’s something we’ve seen plague other large studios, such as BioWare, which has had much of its staff re-assigned to other Electronic Arts-owned studios to address the problem of developers having nothing to do after the completion of a project.
Vincke hopes this strategy will bear fruit by 2030, saying, “I hope I can tell you five years from now that we cracked it, we figured it out. This is what we’re doing now, here’s game one… we’re making this completely different thing, game two. And when game two is ready, we already have another thing coming. If we can make that work in a really good way, where we enjoy our lives, that’s going to be mission accomplished.”
Vincke later jokes that his wife will divorce him if their next game takes longer than five years, so let’s hope Larian figures everything out for the sake of Swen’s marriage.
Although neither of Larian’s in-development games have been announced, there’s a reasonable chance that at least one of them is Divinity: Original Sin 3.
Larian has grown a lot since the release of Divinity: Original Sin 2, a fantastic game, and although the series never reached the popularity of Baldur’s Gate 3, I would love to see where the studio could take the universe with its newly acquired manpower and the experience accumulated from developing Baldur’s Gate 3.
