At the Game Developers Conference 2024, Larian Studios head Swen Vincke gave an incredibly detailed talk entitled "The Secrets of Baldur's Gate 3." In it, he divulged a number of new details about the game's development, ending on the bombshell that Larian would neither be making DLC for Baldur's Gate 3, nor making Baldur's Gate 4. The studio is moving on.
Shortly after his talk, IGN had the pleasure of sitting down with Vincke to talk about... well, everything. The talk we'd just heard, the news he dropped, how the studio is doing post-release, how he feels about the games industry, all of it. We've already written up some of the biggest new reveals Vincke shared with us during that conversation, such as the playable Ketheric Thorm and the studio's plans for additional detail in the game's evil endings. But Vincke shared so many cool insights during our hour-long chat that we felt we needed to share them all with the world. Here's our (lightly edited for clarity) full conversation with Vincke from GDC:
Do we want to start with the elephant in the room? I mean, you kind of dropped a bombshell at the end of that talk, right? You're not doing Baldur's Gate 4. You're not going back to the world of D&D. Obviously you're working on something new, the studio is not going to implode tomorrow. You said a little bit in the talk, but why not Baldur's Gate 4?
Vincke: Well, we started actually thinking about it after Baldur's Gate 3, because of all the success, the obvious thing would've been to do DLC. So we started on one and we started even thinking about BG 4, but we noticed very rapidly that our hearts were not ticking faster. We hadn't really had closure on BG 3 yet, and just to jump forward into something new felt wrong. We also had spent a whole bunch of time converting the system into a video game, and we wanted to do new things. There were a lot of constraints in making D&D, and the 5th Edition is not an easy system to put into a video game, and we had all these ideas of new combat that we wanted to try out, and so they were not compatible. You could see the team was doing it because everybody felt like we had to do it, but it wasn't really coming from the heart and we're very much a studio all about being from the heart.
Counter expectations but I’ve never been more sure about a strategy shift. This is the right thing for Larian. https://t.co/uoEfoblqQi
— Swen Vincke @where? (@LarAtLarian) March 22, 2024
That's what got us into misery all the time, but also been the reason for our success. So I went on a holiday for Christmas and I came back and I said to the team, 'You know what? We're just not going to do it. We're going to shift around and we're just going to start doing these other things that we talked about that we were going to do, that we actually planned on doing before we started on BG III.' we always said those were the plans for afterwards. We have two games that we want to make and we have lots of concepts, so let's just have closures on BG III. We've done our job. It is a story with the beginning and middle and an end, so let's end it here on a high and just pass the torch to the next developer to pick up what is an incredible legacy.
What was the studio's reaction?
Vincke: They were elated. I was surprised. I thought they were going to be angry at me because I just couldn't muster the energy, and I saw so many elated faces, which I didn't expect. You could see they all shared the same feeling, so we were very well aligned with one another. Since then, I've had many, many, many developers come to me afterwards and say, 'thank God.'
A lot of studios have a lot of different methods for figuring out what their next project is going to be. For some, it's just sort of an edict from above. Some people take on projects, but it sounds like you were listening to feedback, but then you were ultimately making the decision that the next thing is going to be X.
Vincke: So, I'm always the one where it starts with the initial idea and then I give it to the team and they start iterating over it and turns it into something much better. During Baldur's Gate 3, I pitched to them what the next games would be, and I had a PowerPoint and I showed it and said 'it looks like this and it's going to be this.' And if I see they're excited, then I say, 'okay, we're going to be doing that.' Because if they're not excited then it's back to the drawing boards. And so they were very, very excited by a couple of the new things that we were planning on doing. And then the pivot to start doing Baldur's Gate 3 DLC was expected because it's what you do.
You alluded to the fact [in your talk] that you've stayed in this set of systems for a while, how Baldur's Gate 3 was born out of Divinity: Original Sin 2. But you've also said in the past that you did eventually want to make Divinity: Original Sin 3. Is that what this is, or is it totally new?
Vincke: I can't tell you.
Fair enough. I had to ask.
Vincke: Yeah, I can't tell you. No, it will have its proper moment. Hopefully nobody's going to leak it for us, but it's different than what you think it is, but it is still familiar enough for you to recognize that it's something that we are making.
Killing Their Darlings
Well, then I'll be very excited about it. I wanted to go back to a little bit of what you were discussing in the actual talk: Astarion was a Tiefling?
Vincke: He was, yeah.
Tell me more about this.
Vincke: I think it was, I don't actually remember a hundred percent, but I think we just wanted to have diversity among the races, and so that's how he became to be a Tiefling. He kind of sounded cool, a Tiefling vampire, and so for a while he was like that, but then he didn't really resonate that strongly as a companion, and so that's how he came to be who he is now.
So he became an Elf instead. So it was basically the same, but he's a Tiefling.
Vincke: No. There was... Well, the characterization has changed heavily since then. Obviously, when Neil [Newbon] was picked as an actor, he added a lot to it, so that defined a lot of the characterization and the mannerisms, but the idea was always, 'okay, there's this vampire spawn. He can walk in the sunlight now. And he has this antagonist who is called Cazador.' so that was always the core of his story, but then from there to get to the characterization was the right character, that's the journey, and that's something that we trade over and we try figuring it out. So because he was seducing a lot of people, he had to be seductive in the way that you were going to see him. That was the way that he got people to become the victims of Cazador. And so yeah, the character that was there at that moment in time wasn't necessarily ready for prime time, as you would say.
I've seen Karlach got a pretty significant glow up as well from I've seen some of her original models and stuff. Did any of the other characters have very, very different origins?
Vincke: They all went through evolution. As we started to get more of a handle who they are, you need to know that the writing on these characters gets redone a lot until we actually hit the right tone and we say, 'okay, that character springs up the screen.' So there's a lot of that going on. And the same goes for the art. If it's like say, okay, it resonates, I want to be that character, which is also really important. I want to recruit that person. I can find them in my party as a friend or as somebody I would get into conflict with, because we also need to have tension and traumatic conflict in there. So there's a whole bunch of parameters that a companion needs to satisfy before they actually are saying, 'okay, you're right.'
There's an entire roster of companions that didn't make the cut. So there were way more than the ones that we know, and they all evolved up to a certain point in their life cycle until we said, 'I'm sorry, you're going to go to companion heaven now.'
Who was your favorite companion that didn't make the cut?
Vincke: That's a really good question actually. Ketheric. Ketheric Thorm was supposed to be-
Really?
Vincke: Yeah, there's a line where-
Oh my God.
Vincke: At the end of-
What?!
Vincke: Yeah, you could convince him. So if you play the game and there's a moment where you can convince him and you can see that a moment where he breaks, that moment led to recruitment normally. We cut that out when we were rescoped. It was part of the fixing of Act Two when we were stuck on it. That was what happened in the rescoping. He was supposed to be in your camp while you were dealing with Gortash and with Orin. So he became a source of information on them, and he could trust, you could get him to his arc. He could then be convinced by him to go to this side. So it was a great story, but yeah.
What were some of the other darlings that were killed?
Vincke: Hell. You were supposed to have an entire visit to Hell. Vlaakith’s Palace, and I keep on forgetting, Tu'narath, the Gith plane. We were going to go to the city, Candlekeep, where the original Baldur's Gate 1 started. So there was all things that we considered that we, at some point, there was a moment where the maps were going to be smaller, and so we were going to be able to give you bigger diversity of location that you would explore. But then the problem with those massive is that the sense of exploration wasn’t really present. So that’s why we killed a whole bunch of them.
I don't want to keep dragging us back to the same topic, but before we get too far away from discussions about what you'll make next and the characters themselves: Do you think you'll continue to do anything with this cast of characters? Because they've resonated so much with people and people really love them.
Vincke: I know. They belong to Wizards now, so I mean, I hope that they're going to honor the legacy and get really good people on them, but as far as we are concerned, the chapter is closed. There's closure for us.
Can you tell me more about the War College?
Vincke: Wyll's dad was going to be there, and he had this big thing with his dad where Wyll sacrificed himself, but his dad didn't know and then expelled him. So that was that story. And so there was going to be a war, the absolute armies, which were marching on Baldur's Gate, you would meet them at the War College. You would be able to stop them there for a while and buy time into the city. So the War College had this huge chess board on which they were strategizing, and so there was an entire scene with a dragon on top of the War college. We actually made that. So there was a dragon which was hopping from tower to tower and tower, but the problem was that it was very large to be able to deal with the dragon, and so we had to fill a lot of real estate with situations.
And so it added so many situations to the roster and said, we just can't make this work. It's too much work. We just can't do this. I mean, it would add so much to the cinematic schedule that was impossible even to the scripting schedule because it was too much. And so we wrote the War College away in the same moment when we wrote all of those other areas away. So we made it a linear path towards Baldur's Gate rather than an nonlinear puff, which was the original invention.
N+1
Have you seen any of the speed runs of Baldur's Gate 3 so far?
Vincke: Yes. It's insane.
What do you think? Did you know people could do these things like the weird Gale jumping?
Vincke: No, no, I didn't expect them to do it that way. We did consciously make sure that the critical path could be done really easy. So we had that.
I remember learning that if you just completely ignored all the characters and ran straight to where you're supposed to go, Shadowheart just comes running up to you and it's like, 'hey, wait, I've got this thing.'
Vincke: That's our n+1 design to make sure that it always works regardless of what you do. So in action, so that principle gets applied. I didn't talk about that today actually, I should have. It's a principle that gets applied on everything that we do.
Wait, so what is the principle?
Vincke: It's called n+1. We introduce it with Original Sin. So basically you always have to assume that all the antagonists and protagonists will be killed by the player. You still have to have a way of telling the critical bits of the story, and that's the plus one solution. It's the fallback solution in case the player f*cked up everything, but they still need to know what they need to do. And so we have a whole bunch of creative ways of dealing with it. So Shadowheart and her Githiyanki artifact, she had 24 versions of giving you, I think at some point, I don't actually know what the actual number is. It might be even more. The 24 versions of giving you the artifact just so that you would not be hindered as you were walking through the game.
You've seen these, you said you didn't think that people were going to do [speedruns] that way. What did you think people were going to do?
Vincke: Well, I mean, the jumping surprised me because they jumped to really specific positions in the map, I was very impressed by how that was done. I thought it was going to be haste all over, but I didn't think they were going to jump through the entire thing.
They've got a new one now that they call Shadow Boxing where they put Shadowheart in a container of some kind, and it's wild. It's just killing her over and over again.
Vincke: Yeah, I haven't seen that. I've heard about it.
What's the most surprising thing you've seen someone, a player do with your game?
Vincke: That's a good question. I blank out that these, everybody asks me these things and I always blank out that I have plenty of them. What was the most surprising thing? I'm going to blank out on it.
Kind of on a similar note, Baldur's Gate 3, there's so much in it. There's just the sheer volume of secrets and hidden paths and things that players can do, and the emergent gameplay of it. People really got into it. We have data mining now. People can basically pull a game as soon as it's released and just learn literally everything about it. But I feel like in Baldur's Gate 3 people were still making discoveries consistently for months on end, but it's something you were cognizant of while you were making it.
Vincke: Yeah, that's part of the design. That's literally part of the mission of putting all those layers in there as we go. So we don't start like this, obviously, it's a built layer upon layer upon layer, and so essentially the scripting teams are allowed to just expand up to a certain point, and so they put it as much as they can. And so for instance, the entire cheese roll scene, that was a guy named Nikita together with Rachel, and they were given freedom on the circus. So the brief was here's a circus, this is what needs to happen, the clown, that, all these things. And there's a couple of boosters so that you can feel like you're in the circus. And then I was working on a dinosaur. They did it and it's great, and it's the type of stuff you want to have in there.
Larian, Amidst It All
You've been super vocal about the games industry's direction. You had a lot of thoughts on, for example, subscription models. You had a lot of thoughts last night during your acceptance speech about layoffs and things like that. I'm just curious to you, what does Larian Studio stand for?
Vincke: Well, it's a really good question. I founded Larian to be able to make the games that I wanted to play. And so my initial obstacle was funding. So I needed a team. I couldn't do it on my own. To get a team, you need to be able to pay people. And so what did you do if you wanted to pay people? You had to go to publishing, you had to fund. And so I remember getting into this industry. I was full of idealism, and that idealism is still there, but it's been heavily tarnished by encountering, over and over, decisions that are not made for the good of the games, that are often made for really the wrong reasons. I hear things in circles that I go and it upsets me, and yesterday it was a perfect storm actually, because in the morning I had heard something that really upset me, I can't talk about it, but it was very fitting of... It fit what I was talking about in the sense I can't believe that this is happening in this day and age.
We've seen it so over and over and over and over again. It's the wrong thing for games. So I fundamentally believe, and I think with Larian, if you go through our history, you will find that if you do it in function of the game and you take a little bit of a more strategic view rather than the short term tactical rapid gain, things like NFTs or that kind of stuff that you actually as a company will most likely be better off because people will associate you with quality and then you'll be like directors or movie stars like Clint Eastwood, you go to a Clint Eastwood movie, you know it's going to be good. At least I always thought they were good. So if you are sure that you can set for that quality, your games will sell, your movies will sell. And so I find that much more important for video games.
And so also I fought very hard for my teams in the past. I've been there, I had problems on the income side, so I had to go back from 33 people. It was the most horrible part of my life. I've been there, I've had nothing left, and I needed to live on the salary of my wife because I had to put it all into the company to make sure I didn't have to fire anybody. My team, most of the team that I started out with are still with me, but they went through quite a lot of bumps like this. And so sometimes it was my fault, sometimes I couldn't do anything about it. And so I learned there that there are things that are going to lead to problems and you shouldn't do them. And then there are things where you say, 'okay, that's a reasonable risk to take,' and you have to take risks, otherwise you're not going to be able to innovate, and then you don't want to be stale either.
But then there's things that get done. I heard, 'oh, we are making $1 billion now and in three years we'll make $2 billion.' Come on. All right. That's literally a mission statement that I heard from a particular publisher. And so obviously they fired plenty of people and things went wrong, and the decisions that are being made are, you know, they're the wrong decisions. And it upsets me because I work with those people and I really don't understand why, because on top of that, there's typically people that don't play the games, so they have nothing to do with the art of game making. So I'm not going to say this way too much trouble. So I have strong opinions about it because I was a developer. Well, I am a developer, but I was a developer that struggled a lot like are people struggling now. In the beginning, I came to GDC, I had to sacrifice everything to get here.
It's a long answer. I'm really sorry, but you hit home there. So I don't think the struggle should have been that hard if some of the interests of the companies that could provide the funding would've been slightly different. And I think that goes across the board. And if that would be the case, I think we would have a better industry and we would have better games actually, rather than seeing rehash after rehash until the player audience gets tired of it. So that's also why it was important with Baldur's Gate 3, we said, 'okay, we've done that. Now we don't have to start milking it. We can just go and do something new.' I'm sorry. It's very incoherent. So that's my thing.
In your talk about how you let what Baldur's Gate 3 needed dictate the growth of your studio, which is very the opposite of what you're talking about right now, but now you do have this massive team.
Vincke: But I mean, I do have a really good fuel meter, so that's the big bit. So I use this with someone else. If you have to go to the North Pole, that's fine, you can go to the North Pole, but you'll have to make sure that you have plenty of reserves, you'll have plenty of fuel. So that's what my point was actually. So it's fine to do these big things. There's nothing wrong with doing what you need to be done, otherwise we don't progress. But you need to make sure you have the resources to do it. Look, you're a very successful studio. Here's a couple of things that you can do. You can start making 20 games or you can just make a couple of games and say, 'this is my reserve, these are my fallback lines.' I always had fallback lines during the production of this game.
And so that needs to be in place before you do it. You build your castle layer by layer, but it's got to be a castle. Foundations need to be solid, so you build it on top. And because we had so much troubles in our history, I took very great care to make sure that if it was going to go wrong, I would be able to continue and make another game. So there's at no point during the development of BG 3 did we not have the position to pivot and go make something else and make another one. That one would have to be successful then though, but I thought that was sufficient reserve. So that was my point, you built reserves and the thing that frustrates the hell out of me.
I had a lunch with my old agent yesterday and we spent a lot of time pitching to publishers. And so he's the one actually that maybe say what I said because he said like, oh my God. I said, how is it going? He said, it's actually, it's picking up, he said. Because it's the end of the quarter and it's the end of the quarter. So they're starting to realize that they fired too many people and that they're going to need to make new games because at the next quarter, they're going to have to say what their outlook is going to be because then they'll have to say what strategic outlook is going to be. So now they're looking for a lot of co-development, right? Then they're going to figure out that with the co-development alone, they can't make a game. You want all sources, so you have to bring the studios back, so they're going to hire you again.
And he's been doing this for a long time, longer than me. So he's literally seen that pattern continuously. And I've seen it too. It's always the same thing. So, you would think that by now they would've figured it out, but the problem is that you got the quarter of the profit and what's associated with that is the fucking bonus. And that's the one, that's the killer. It's the bonus. So where those decisions get made, that is the driver. Yes, it's a harsh reality, but it's the one that you see over and over and over. And so it's very frustrating because those companies that get handicapped, because people that are let go, there's a lot of people in there that are really good at what they're doing. And so you lose all that knowledge. And there's a book, I forgot who it was, but the guy said he calculated the cost of letting someone go. And he says, well, I mean it takes you six months to educate somebody into your team again. And then for each year that they are there, there's so much knowledge that is being lost.
But because the ones that are making those decisions don't play the games, don't understand the ethos, they don't care about it. They don't understand that fundamental truth that that's in there. It's just, oh, well, it's a technical artist, we can get another technical artist, whatever. Also, who fires their technical artists?!
Apparently a lot of people.
Vincke: You have no idea how important that knowledge is to your entire pipeline.
Can I sneak in one more on this philosophy? As you said, this feels very at odds with where a lot of the rest of the industry is right now. Do you feel you need to remain independent to keep everything that you just said correct for your studio?
Vincke: Well, I took a minority investment, but but that was my fallback line, right? So I used that because I had that on the side for if it was going to go wrong. So that was part of my strategy when we started doing this risk. There's others like us, we're not alone doing this. I mean, it's not all doom and misery. I mean, there's a lot of bright voices in this industry, but I do think it's important to be called out, especially because there's a couple of decisions that I see where I know the actual truth behind things, and I disagree. I don't think those decisions are necessary. And some of them, you should probably do a little bit more investigative journalism there as you might discover quite a lot.
Watching the Fuel Meter
I guess there's a lot of discourse recently about the sustainability of AAA development, budgets, development time, Baldur's Gate 3 was an enormously complicated project spread across several studios worldwide. You said that the budget wasn't as high as you would think, but it was still probably very high. It is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, I'm sure. So is AAA development in this kind of environment sustainable?
Vincke: Yes, and I will tell you why, because the player base is there. So if there's an audience, the games can be made, but you need to know that the audience is there. So our approach was we'll make act one and we'll scale and function of that. And then we put it in early access. There's an old rule in this industry, I'm not sure if it's 100% correct, but to me, to my knowledge, it's always been correct. You take your pre-orders, you multiply by 10, you know your target audience, and so if you don't fuck up between your pre-orders and then you will manage to hit that target audience.
So based on the sales of early access, I could predict what the sales were going to be for BG 3 later on, barring external circumstances, like something like a competitor hitting. So I used that to guide me in making decisions of how far we were going to scale up. You will have noticed that there was a moment where I told the team, we've got to stop now. We've got to bring it to a closure because that's what the fuel meter was telling us. Okay, we probably shouldn't go further than that, otherwise we will hit fallback position.
And if that's a million or 100,000 or 10,000, that doesn't mean that you can't make games, but you can educate them. And I think it's important that you have big games being made because they take the entire industry with them. It used to be that the platform holders were the ones that were making those games. They said, 'here's the guiding light. We're making this game. We're not necessarily looking for profit, we're just doing it to sell our platform.' But at the same time, they showed this is what's possible now, and it inspired all of us to start doing the same thing. And so games are the crossroads between technology and art, which is what's fantastic about them. So you need to keep on pushing forward to be able to get better. And it's a funny thing that in our industry, our players also demand that that progress is there.
And I think that's a fantastic thing about it. And so it's not going to happen without taking risks. And I don't mind if an accident happens. I mean, it's always unfortunate, but typically the talent is so good that it'll always land elsewhere. So I don't think that's going to be necessarily the problem. What really my argument is against is the exploitative nature of certain practices or the predictability of certain disasters that you actually literally know it's not going to work out because there's curves that you can follow and that you can say, 'okay, well that's the upper limit, right?' A really great example was Atari with the ET cartridges, if you make more cartridges and they are harder to do, you're going to get into trouble. So don't do that. So do it in function of your audience is basically my thing.
Well, you mentioned early access. I know you've been a huge proponent of early access for multiple games in a row now, and I am curious if you have any sort of post-mortem thoughts on how this one went. Oone of the big criticisms that I've heard of Baldur's Gate 3 is that that Act One super polished, amazing, well done because it was an early access for certain time and you got all that feedback. Act three had some problems.
Vincke: It did. Yeah. I know. Yeah, one day I'll figure that one out.
The take away from the talk was that this was a little bit of the dark side of early access, people saying Baldur's Gate 3 was successful because of early access, but you were talking about everything was happening live, and so effectively you were walking this tight rope and there was not a lot of margin for error.
Vincke: No. So one of the important bit, I did say it, but I knew it was going to be lost in translation. I talked about what's in my lead meetings and docs. That's what I did. That was my research. So that's a negative document, not because the people are negative, but we're trying to solve the problems we're encountering. There's a lot of successes next to it also. I could do a talk about early access and make the list of upsides is way longer than the list of downsides. This is the downsides that you have to overcome. But it is the model of the future. I mean, it's not only for your mechanics and your balancing, but even your story gets better. You see how players resonate, what they're after. And so if you integrate that into your pipe, you're doing better. Really what I was trying to say, you have to make your pipes to be able to deal with it. And so there's a number of things.
And what our problem was that when we made Original Sin 2, we were smaller, so the cracks in the ceiling weren't so large, but as we amplified, those cracks were really bloody important. And that's the bit that we needed to fix because we didn't see them. But we knew them and we're smart enough where we can patch them. And then some things became too big to handle, so we had to find solutions, but we knew that the team is really bright so they can overcome anything given the time. So it's really a question of giving them time to be able to do their thing and they'll manage anything that's thrown at them.
Is there anything you're already thinking you want to do differently next time?
Vincke: Yeah, so I told the team for this year, our main thrust is literally the automation of the pipeline, so that we don't have to spend manual labor on things that are really not interesting but need to be done. So it is things like, you check in on something and is the game broken? Yes or no? That's an important bit to know, right? Because you don't want that to propagate further down the pipeline.
And while it's an easy thing to say, it's a really complicated thing to do because you, essentially, were talking about the thing that plays the game automatically. So we have that tech, but it's really work intensive and we need to optimize our pipelines, but that will allow us to iterate more rapidly and to make sure that the feature, when it gets to the developer that needs it, isn't broken.
It's things like making sure that the startup is faster. There are very complicated tools, terabytes of data have to come together just to be able to work on them. So those things are very, very important from the get-go. And they're not very sexy, but they are so important when you're making them. So I think that is collaboration. So the problem with meetings is that they take time. So you want to minimize the amount of meetings. At the same time, you want to know that everybody knows when they're doing something, they want to have that information. So optimizing that process is a really big focus also. So how do we make sure that when somebody is working on something and they want to change something, they know that it's going to affect someone else.
And how do we warn that person that something has changed so they can have the conversation? Should we do this change? Yes or no? My work might be affected and it'll take me five minutes. And for you, it's only five seconds. Is it worth it? Right? Sometimes it is worth it and then you should do it. But that thing, those are very specific development problems which we learned are super important at scale. So for us, this was a lesson in scaling and we scaled during code, which is really not the best environment to scale, and scaling is already very hard. Managing that entropy is a big, big, big ambition.
Yeah. You mentioned automation. Does any of this fall into the basket of AI or is that something different?
Vincke: AI is a very large subject. So the thing that's under criticism is generative AI, but there are a whole bunch of other things where you really want AI to be busy in your process. So my stance on AI is really straightforward. It is a tool that we use to help us do things faster. We have so much work that we're happy to take assistance from anything. I don't think it'll ever replace a creative side of things and I can put money where my mouth is.
So, for instance, concept art is a thing that's heavily under fire because of things like Midjourney. So we just added 15 concept artists to our team. And so this is exactly the opposite of what you would expect, right? Because it was a bottleneck in our pipeline. And the pipeline bottleneck in the past was we don't have the concept art coming fast enough, so the creatures are not made fast enough, so the technical animators can't rig it fast enough, so the animators can't do the monster fast enough so they run out of work, which is really the worst thing we want in a development environment. So that's how we solve that. We're hiring writers, so we're not having ChatGPT write their dialogues. However, I do want to say, I do see a usage of generative AI.
It's what I said in my talk in the answers to questions. I think you can have reactive games and that's where it can have a place. So you can compliment what's there already. So that's the thing that we should be exploring because how we'll make better RPGs. So what I think is, in the future, I don't buy the full NPC being generated, but most likely everything will feel the same. So I buy more that there's going to be something that's crafted, and then you'll have AI that plugs into it to augment it. And it should be done in such a way that it's invisible, so you don't know that it's shifting around. So I think that's the thing of the future. At least the short to midterm future. Long term, I don't know.
What is inspiring you right now?
Vincke: I'm playing Balatro, I'm playing Vampire Survivors. So these are all things that I didn't play while I was there developing. I want to play Dragon's Dogma 2. I still need to play Alan Wake 2.
Did you play the original Dragon's Dogma?
Vincke: No. No.
Okay. This is new for you.
Vincke: But what I've seen of the gameplay that they're showing, it looks very akin to what we like, it's systemic gameplay. I am very curious to see what they did in there.
Too Many Jira Tasks
You talk at a very high level about what you want to accomplish with Larian project managing. How would you say that you personally have changed and how your outlook has changed in the six years or so since you started working on Baldur's Gate 3?
Vincke: That's a deep introspective question. What has changed? Well, I've come more convinced as we grew up of how important is to do bottom up development. So I used, and I still do sometimes, go in top down heavy because I said, 'well, we need to fix this and this and take it in my hands and do it.' I know it's not the right thing to do. Sometimes it was necessary because it was the only way of doing it. But I think I told myself that for the next project, I need to find better ways of making sure that the bottom up is happening so that I don't have to do it myself, and I can enjoy the fruits of the labor that's being done. Now, this is hard and not for the reasons that a lot of people think. I think the problem that's hard is because the games are so large, somebody has to integrate it all in their heads so that they can connect the dots across departments that are very far from each other.
So that's my job. And so you then have two choices where you start connecting the dots. If you have the ability to do it yourself, you could do it right away and then it's solved. Or you can go and tell the developer, which takes communication, which takes time. And then when you're stressed for time, you tend to do it yourself. But I learned that you can do that and you can fix it, but then you're going to have to keep on doing it. And at some point that becomes unsustainable. So you have to figure out ways of making sure that those connections are made, which is where those tools that I was telling you about come in, because that can help with that. But it's really complicated, and it's something I talked to other RPG studios, they have the same problem. So it is this balance between the reviewing pipeline and the creation pipeline and how you handle the meta knowledge.
Jason did his talk yesterday and he talked about never reading the dialogues. I didn't want to read the dialogues. There was too many of them. When I heard that for the first time, I said, 'are you insane?! You're not reading the dialogues?!' He said, 'you're changing them the entire time!' Which is true. And he just needed to have the information he needed to organize his work so that the person who was going to work on the dialogue was going to be able to do their work on that dialogue. And we learned from that how complicated... We had 311,000 tasks in Jira. So task tracking management System.
311,000!
Vincke: 311,000.
Wow. That's too many tasks.
Vincke: I know. Yeah, well, but that's the reality of making these type of games. That's the amount of assets, features, things that have to be done at some point.
It's funny, I was in an Elder Scrolls arena postmortem yesterday, and they had a team of a dozen, and they said that was a huge team. And they said, we took 12 months to make this game and it took too long.
Vincke: Well, we look at different games, different methodologies. So.
Game development in 1993, it was just a whole different beast then.
Vincke: Well, if you want to, the perfect developer back in the days was the solo developer. They didn't have to communicate so they could deal with themselves. And you can still do that for smaller games, but you can't if you want to make these large ones, that's all about teamwork and making sure that really skilled people can do their thing.
Game development really is just project management, super high level project management. It's not particularly...
Vincke: It's messy. That's what it is. And it's messy by its nature because you're pursuing trying to come up with something new, pursuing that feeling. I really, I am very insistent on keeping on talking about chasing that feeling where you say, 'oh, this is going to be good.'
The elation!
Vincke: Yeah, exactly because you don't know upfront what the formula is going to be, and you have to look for it. And so the problem with that is that it generates new tasks continuously. What am I going to be doing? And so you can't project manage that because you don't know upfront. You can organize yourself where you can say, 'oh, this is where I have to stop.' So that you can do, but it's very hard to say upfront what it's going to be when you still don't know. You just have a vague idea of what you're going to be doing, and then you start exploring.
So those exploration phases are important, but understanding that the tasks and what they're going to cost, that's where the project management comes into. And that's in large projects, that's heavy chaos. I mean, the entropy exists, right? It is the nature of the universe. So you will have it when you have large things. There's nothing to be done about it. Does that mean you shouldn't be making the large things? No, I don't think so. I know there's a lot of people that talk about it. These things are too large, but I disagree with that. I think it's manageable. You just have to make sure that you're ready to do it. So you're ready to journey across the desert. People do journey across the desert. They've been doing it for thousands of years.
Cloud Gaming, Writ Large
You brought up a bunch of stuff in your talk, but I wanted to revisit with so many different directions. Say more on Google Stadia. Okay, so you said that that ended up being a horrible decision, and I can guess at why, but did that seriously impact you guys?
Vincke: Yeah, so it's not the fact that Stadia went under that impacted us. It is the fact that we were doing a console release ahead of time. So normally what you do is you make the game and then you optimize it. We had to optimize it before we were making the game. And so that was a mistake and that caused too much stress on the developers. So I don't want to put them through that again. So I did it for the money, if I'm being really honest about it.
Did you believe in the tech?
Vincke: Yeah, I did. Yeah, the initial vision was much stronger than what was released.
Fair enough.
Vincke: So it was actually when the pitch was done to us, it was going to be insane. I mean, they talked about this, I think, where you were going to be able to click on YouTube, anything.
Yes, they did it with Assassin's Creed. They showed a little demo of that, but it never happened.
Vincke: No, and that's the thing I was counting on. I said, for a game that has so much permutations as ours, this is going to be fantastic. So we need to be at the forefront of that. And honestly, the CGI that was in the game would not have been made without Google. So they gave us the intro, they gave us target image. So I'm very happy that we did that deal in that sense. But it put too much stress on the developers. I wouldn't do that again. I don't want to, I think consoles always will have to come after we finished our PC releases and early access so that we know what we're making so we can optimize that bit. And then on PC, you have the advantage that you can scale things still because you have the specs, but you don't have that on console. It's a fixed target. Typically it's made to cost, which means that it has limited memory, it has limited cycles, and that makes it harder to make. So it requires a whole bunch of extra effort to be done.
Do you still think cloud gaming is anything?
Vincke: So the same agent I told you about earlier also told me one of the most important lessons that I had as a young developer. He told me, content is king. It doesn't matter what the platform is. There is a lot of talk about platforms and whatever, and I try to be on all platforms. So whoever wins is fine. I mean, good for you. I just want players to be able to play my games. That's why we do cross saves and we wanted to do cross play, although we weren't ready and we delayed it. We're still going to do it, and it's just going to take us time. It turns out to be really tricky.
I mean, it explains why you ended up in an unprecedented situation with Xbox to make sure that Baldur's Gate 3 made it there.
Vincke: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the split screen was a problem there because split screen has the issue that you have to serve two parts of the world at the same time, and we're a multiplayer game. So the situation was that you could be in split screen on Series X, you could be in on Series S, and you had to play together. So on top of that, the server had to be running that, and the server is one of those Series S, and it all needs to to run on the thing. We had the same problem with the Switch. When we did DOS 2, we managed eventually, but it took us a year and a half extra to be able to do it. So I thought we did quite well actually on getting it on Series S. But that one was quite a technical hurdle, and if we would've insisted on doing that, we wouldn't have managed. So that's why we said, 'okay, we have to stop chasing perfection on all of these things and just make some compromises.'
Spring on the Way
You had two moments in your talk where you said something and then you said, but that's a whole other talk. And I was going to try to see if I could get you to expand on them at all. One of them, you were talking about having studios in a bunch of different places and working across time zones, and you said a lot of the good things about that, but then you said it also has some challenges. Can you give me an overview of what those are?
Vincke: It's communication. So that's the main one. It was funny when everybody was going to work from home and we said, 'this is all going to work!' We already had so much troubles getting our studios to communicate from the beginning, so trying to do that in the way that we were working was going to turn out to be very, very complicated. So I think communication is the biggest one, because if you want to have ownership, it's easier if you're together. If it's spread across time zones, that can be a problem because if you're here on the West Coast right now, people are sleeping in Kuala Lumpur. If you have to have a conversation from a studio in Quebec with people in Kuala Lumpur, that's an issue if it's feature development. So we learned that you can't put all disciplines into that model, but what you do get as a benefit is that you can recruit easier for all disciplines because you're recruiting across the globe.
But for things like QA or for coders who are looking for bugs or scripts that are looking for bugs, it's fantastic. I do something, I go home, I send it over to you, here's the description of what I've done. They'll continue doing it. And so that work, that saves us a lot of time. It saved us a lot also during BG 3, because you don't have producers who have to sit in the middle of the night waiting for whatever to go, they can just pass it on to the other producer. So it helps a lot in managing credential. So it's a really good one.
Do you not believe in remote work?
Vincke: Well, I have a very nuanced answer on this. So for games like we are doing, I wouldn't know how to do it. There's too much. So we saw the difference when we were working remote, and the difference when people returned to the studio was remarkable. Act Two was because we were all remote. And it's just because we have so much communication that needs to be done. We haven't figured out how to process it. Would we solve the full process? Probably it would work, and it works really well for seniors, but it's very much harder for juniors. The juniors need a mentor, and so they need mentorship, and it's harder to mentor remotely than if you mentor the person. So those were for a team that was rapidly growing. Jason's team, thematic director was all junior when they started. So a lot of them were juniors. They were just off school. So they need to learn a lot.
And we certainly had big, big, big problems due to lack of communication. And these are an RPG also. So I guess they're also kind of specific in that sense. There's a huge amount of systems that have to work together synchronously for the entire thing to work. And so any small mistake can blow up later.
I think the other one you mentioned was you talked about how there's a whole story about how you had to negotiate work visas to get folks out of Russia, and that being really difficult. Do you mind sharing a little bit more about that?
Vincke: Well, it came up to the point that our studios were haunting down the ambassadors so that they would give an approval just so that they would get a work permit. So getting the work permits was the major problem. So the initial bit was just getting people out. So figuring that out. But that's not it. That comes with an entire family, the dog, the cat. Turns out the dogs and the cats were the hardest bit. So we spend more time and more money on getting some dogs out of Russia than we did on the people, which is crazy.
Wow.
Vincke: So it's miserable situation. I mean, studio had to work day and night literally to find solutions. They were made so every single person inside of the studio so that they could have a future, that they could still keep on working with us. Many of them were called upon to go to the Army and then they didn't want to. They weren't in support of this thing. So that's a complicated situation to be in.
What do you want to be doing in 10 years at Larian?
Vincke: My retirement question.
Stomping around in your armor?
Vincke: It's because of gray hair, right?
Does it make you feel better if I tell you, I ask most people this?
Vincke: Okay, good. Yeah. Thank you. I actually want to keep on doing what I'm doing right now. I'm enjoying very much what I'm doing. I hope that maybe a little bit more hands off. So that would mean that I've succeeded in getting a team that can do everything. And so I really enjoy them surprising. What Nick said yesterday on stage is an important thing. He gets joy from seeing me surprised by something that's inside of the game. And I get joy by being surprised by something that's in the game and knowing that it's good. The bits that I don't like is having to tell them it's not good, we need to do it again. I really like when you get, I mean, my face, when I saw for the dinosaur for the first time, I had been asking him like, what the fuck is there a dinosaur in the game?! I'm like, what is this? And he was really insistent on the dinosaur. He knew what he was going to be doing with the child thing already. He was aware of the thing. And so it's like, okay, good for you. Well done on the dinosaur.
You're still releasing hot fixes and updates. Can you expect anything on the scale of the fixing updates?
Vincke: Yeah. Well, the big thing is going to be the rollout of mods. So we are working with Wizards, Sony, Microsoft, a lot of partners to align, but we're trying to get cross-platform curated mods in there so that people on console can enjoy the mods that are being made for the PC also. So that'll be a big thing, I think, because there's a lot of mods already, and then we won't be able to support everything, but we should be support quite a share. We have a bunch of big features that are still in development, haven't been released that were on our roadmap since day one, and we still wanted to make them. So there's stuff.
You're not going to see massive content changes though. So there's still epilogue work being done. So we committed after seeing feedback from the players that we were going to give each ending a full cinematic treatment. It takes time. So they're working on the evil endings right now. I've seen some of them. They're really evil. So the evil players will be satisfied with that. So there's a bunch of work still going on on that front, but as time progresses, we are going to scale down. It's just going to be support on bugs. We want the team to be working on new things. So in that sense, the closure will be complete also.
And of course, Switch 2 is on everybody's radars. Do you think a port would be on your radar at any point?
Vincke: Well, I mean, as I said, I want to be on any platform, but that is first to see what it is. All right.
Thank you. You really cheered me up.
Vincke: I did?
Yeah. I don't know. Everything's kind of grim out there right now. This is really uplifting.
Vincke: I think summer is coming. Spring at least is coming. We had the same situation in 2009. So there was a huge economic crisis. And so you saw a lot of closures also. For similar reasons right now. But what then happened is you saw an insurgency of new developers pop up, right? And they came up with a whole bunch of things that resonated well with players. I don't think I'm mistaken, but I think Steam grew last year, right? It didn't retract. So that means there are more players than before. That means there's a larger basis for supporting the games industry. So they're just going to shift. They're going to go to things where they're interested in. Developers will adapt to that. You'll see a lot of new development talent coming up, getting their chances, and they'll find their players through early access or maybe through external funding or whatever. And that'll be the new insurgency. What goes down must go up.
And so I do hope we maybe haven't hit rock bottom yet, but I think we'll see an upward trend at some point. And I think the seeds are already there. And if you look really hard, you can see where the seeds are because all those developers that were let go are not going to leave the games de facto, they're going to just regroup and start doing new things.
