It’s not unfair to say that the true popularity of Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3 kicked off just before launch where players were shown the height of the game’s saucy romance scenes: shacking up with the Druid Halsin whilst he was in his Bear Form.
As soon as the news was spread literally everywhere online, BG3 jumped from a pretty popular early access CRPG to a worldwide phenomenon, one that is still selling well even after the reveal of Larian’s next game, Divinity.
In an interview with Fall Damage, Halsin actor Dave Jones recalled the moment he was told about his character’s big romance scene. As Larian was developing the game alongside the actor’s performances, Jones had no idea what Halsin’s saucy scene would be when he signed up for the role. At that point, the character’s iconic scene had not been decided.
“When I first found out about the bear scene I was on a train down to London for one of the sessions,” Jones told the YouTube channel. “We get the scripts a couple of days beforehand and you can look through. I just burst out laughing. I just burst out… it was more the fact that, oh, oh we’re going there. To some people it could have been quite shocking but this basically being D&D, you can do anything in D&D and this goes perfectly hand in hand with that.”
Since the release of Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian’s RPG has seen an almost Skyrim-level of constant popularity with tens of thousands of gamers concurrently playing the game on PC alone at every point in time.
Jones explained that he’s not surprised Larian’s epic RPG is still so popular, nearly three years after launch, due to the quality of acting and directing on display. “There were over 250 actors, all performance capture, and there’s not one of them that left any crumbs,” he said. “Every performance was beautifully handled, wonderfully directed… we had a fantastic team of directors. It’s no great surprise that everybody keep replaying it.”
With Larian no longer working on Baldur’s Gate, although Hasbro is confident that a fourth game will “of course” happen without the CRPG studio. Nevertheless, Larian Studios is still bursting full speed ahead with the development of Divinity, a game that CEO Swen Vincke has described as “Larian unleashed”.
While there is currently no Divinity release date at the time of writing, it’s expected that the turn-based CRPG will release in early access at some point during 2028. However, even then, it’s not known how long Larian wants the game to remain in early access for. Just for comparison’s sake, Baldur’s Gate 3 spent around three years in early access before its full release.
