Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3 has been a huge success, but it is an outlier in many cases. Prior to Larian, the original BG3 couldn’t get made due to publishers not wanting to fund a large single-player RPG.
Now that Baldur’s Gate 3 is out and is massively successful, publishers want their own take on the game. Hasbro is now pumping $1 Billion into D&D games alongside its plans to make a BG4, and The Outer Worlds 2 lead has claimed that Larian’s success has caused publishers to open their eyes to the potential of RPGs again.
Neil Newbon, the actor behind Baldur’s Gate 3’s most popular party member, Astarion, believes that Baldur’s Gate 3 is a lesson for the studio. While the actor believes he’ll never star in a game as profound as Larian’s work again, he believes it is a clear reminder that publishers “chasing the money” will miss out.
When asked in a recent interview if Baldur’s Gate 3 can never be surpassed, Lae’zel actor Devora Wilde and Astarion actor Neil Newbon both disagreed. “I’m going to be optimistic and say ‘no’, although Baldur’s Gate 3 set a very, very, very high bar,” Wilde replied.
Newbon, meanwhile, was more detailed in their response, adding that BG3 is more “lightning in a bottle” than an investor would likely tell you. However, as long as developers are chasing art and not only chasing money, there’s a high possibility that Larian’s RPG will be surpassed, if not by Larian’s upcoming Divinity game.
‘It doesn’t mean that other people can’t do similar ventures with similar aspirations,” Newbon said. Most importantly, he adds that “the passion has to be the same” with a team of creatives coming together to create the stories and mechanics that they want instead of following a bullet-point list of trends.
“That’s not impossible, at all,” he said. “I just think that Baldur’s Gate proved a lot of things in the games industry. That maybe some bigger companies who are really just chasing the money need to learn from.”
There’s hope that Larian’s work on its in-development Divinity revival will somehow eclipse the studio’s work on BG3. Currently in the works at the RPG studio, CEO Swen Vincke has described the game as Larian “unleashed” with the turn-based CRPG primed to take everything BG3 does “to the next level”.
Since working on Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian has made some major technical changes under-the-hood of its internal game engine to deliver a CRPG with a much grander scale. Unlike BG3, “there is no limitation anymore on how big an act can be” for the upcoming game, allowing for multi-region acts that take place over an entire world.
