You might have heard: while Larian isn’t done with updating Baldur’s Gate 3, the studio’s next game won’t be Baldur’s Gate 4 or anything to do with D&D.
But while studio founder and head Swen Vincke mentioned the team was working on “a new thing” in his enjoyably open talk at GDC, it wasn’t exactly clear what “new” meant. Speaking to Eurogamer at the event however, Vincke elaborated just a little further. The next thing will be “New in the sense that it is different from the things that we’ve done before.”
It will be “Still familiar enough, but different,” he said, while the “tone, style, way of doing it, are for us certainly new – and I think very appealing. I would love to talk about it already – because I’m very excited about it – but I can’t say more. But it’s new in that sense.”
Vincke also clarified what appears to be a slight misunderstanding about the game’s overall size, however that might be defined. During the week Vincke has been quoted as saying the next game the studio is working on would “dwarf” it. That doesn’t quite match up to what he intended.
“Did I say that, really, like that? I think that I’ve been misquoted on this,” he said. “I saw that pass by and I said, ‘I need to check what I actually said’, either because I was heavily jetlagged so either I said it wrongly, or…
“So it’s not a very big RPG that will dwarf them all, that we’re making now – I mean like, we have a couple, we have two games that we want to make – and [that] we actually intended on after making BG3, so we’re just back on that track now. They’re big and ambitious, that’s for sure. But I mean, I think scope-wise, BG3’s probably already good enough!”
Vincke was also one of several developers to come out with strongly-worded statements on the industry’s ongoing struggle with layoffs, with the Larion boss citing publisher “greed” as a cause. Vincke also elaborated on this with Eurogamer during our conversation at GDC – expect much more from that chat very soon.