Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the best RPGs ever made and Larian’s adventure through the Sword Coast in incredibly deep in a way that most games really aren’t.

Just two years after the release of Baldur’s Gate 3, the game is seemingly changing the games industry as publishers are finally seeing value in sprawling role-playing games.

In an interview with GamesRadar, The Outer Worlds 2 developers explained that publishers and gamers as a whole are now significantly “more open” to really deep RPGs following Larian’s huge sales and critical acclaim.

The Outer Worlds 2 is a massively expanded sequel compared to the quite limited RPG original. Following the low-budget first game, Obsidian Entertainment was able to adapt the “deeper RPG” systems that the first game’s directors really wanted for its predecessor, and this is largely because Baldur’s Gate 3 has removed some of the stigma from role-playing.

“In the first game, one of our tag lines was ‘an RPG with RPG elements’ because, for a very long time and even when we were pitching the original Outer Worlds to different publishers, you’d think that was a no-brainer, right? Obsidian making a new RPG – it’s like, come on! You know people would be interested in that,” explained creative director and Fallout co-creator Leonard Boyarsky.

“And as they’re making all these games with ‘RPG Elements’ and way more role-playing, there was still a kind of trepidation. Now, with things like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Outer Worlds having come out, I think people are a lot more open to it again. It feels like we had to prove ourselves all over again, to a certain degree.”

The Outer Worlds 2 game director Brandon Adler explained that the runaway success of Baldur’s Gate 3 proved to publishers that “people really, actually want these kinds of games” as well as proving that the team was “on the right track” in making their sequel much, much more RPG-focused.

Boyarsky explained that with a changed industry and a lot of Microsoft money, the team is able to make a game that harkens “back to more of the traditional Obsidian style of RPG” like Fallout: New Vegas.

“But really, at the core […] I knew that if I could make a game that I would want to go and buy and play, we were on the right track,” Boyarsky explained. “I love RPGs, and we wanted that to come through. That’s why we made a game that you can go very deep with how you build your character and equipment, you want lots of synergy between things, and we wanted to display it in the game. So there’s lots of interactions in the game that build on, like, whatever your character build is – things like that. And yeah, we knew that there was a group of people – hopefully a large group of people – that really want that.”

While Baldur’s Gate 3’s main campaign is quite long, The Outer Worlds 2 is aiming for an extremely dense 30-hour story with a great deal of extras on the side. Nevertheless, it’s an RPG-heavy experience with a pretty damn big budget, and at least some of that is down the fact that Larian proved so many publishers wrong and created a historic game that will define a generation.