Larian is following up Baldur’s Gate 3 with not one, but two up-to-date RPGs. And, unsurprisingly, they’re likely to be substantial games. That’s just Larian’s style, but that comes with its own set of problems, especially when following up on a game as massive and extensive as Baldur’s Gate 3.
One of the challenges of building larger RPGs after massive RPGs is finding original ideas to fill them with. Speaking to story director Adam Smith on the first anniversary of Baldur’s Gate 3 (check out the full interview about Larian’s past, present, and future), he told me that this is a problem Larian is currently grappling with.
“One of the biggest problems we have now is that whenever we talk about something, we say we did it in BG3,” Smith says. “And it turns out we did a lot of things in BG3 when we think about it.” It’s a classic “The Simpsons did it” problem.
This isn’t a up-to-date problem for Larian, though. The first Divinity: Original Sin was also pretty meaty, and Divinity: Original Sin 2 was massive — so this problem was present even as the studio worked on Baldur’s Gate 3.
“It was the same thing throughout development,” Smith says. “Have they seen this pattern before? Have they used these verbs in this order before? Have they gone through this emotional arc before? So you’re constantly trying to make sure they’re getting a new experience and you’re not just repeating yourself and giving them content for content’s sake.”
Inevitably, game developers have to deal with comparisons to their previous games, no matter how much up-to-date material is crammed into them. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a unique game on its own merits, but it still evokes memories of the Original Sin games and, of course, its classic Infinity Engine predecessors. That’s not a bad thing. But Larian has a robust desire to try up-to-date things and experiment.
It will likely be some time before we see what form these experiments take. Larian has remained hushed on both of its next RPGs, leaving us with plenty of room for hope and speculation.
