This is not an endorsement by the way - as someone who has worked in a similar type of industry (in both production and creative driven companies (though mine had far more of a dictatorship)), the way they described their workflow was giving me anxiety. But it did provide me tons of clarity as to why Larian is the way they are. If you didn't think they were right for BG3, I think the documentaries will basically confirm and clarify all of that for you. It'll also be pretty clear why they'd probably never commit to any form of a roadmap.
Geeze. That sounds more like they were filming an artificially dramatic reality TV series about making a game, more than actually making a game. That's not the way you want to do things. There's a depressing term called 'feature locked' that exists for a reason, so you aren't making radical changes when you should be finalizing and polishing. I hope they have more discipline in making BG3.
It's a double-edge sword IMO. Their willingness to iterate and reworking things is likely a key reason why their last few products have been so successful, but it's also responsible for their production chaos. I'm sure studios doing the EA sports games or even the COD games probably have much tighter and structured timelines, but are very also likely phoning it in on many other aspects of design.
As someone who has worked in the creative field, this kind of chaos is kind of typical when you have a "creativity first" studio (though Larian's case seem to be a bit on the extreme side). Based on their learnings in DOS2, it does look like Larian have learned some key lessons:
- By the end of DOS 2, they've assigned a proper writing lead for the story as opposed to a the beginning democracy where EVERYONE had a say (they literally had a Google Doc where anyone can comment previously).
- They are still expecting a million changes, but have at least revamped many of their systems to accommodate it. I.e. automated testing to speed up QA rounds, testing within a "white box" setting (i.e. testing key changes without needing to put in all the other details). improved documentation system so that it limits confusion and messes between writers, scripters, and QA people.
- One of the reasons they've been expanding like mad is basically to accommodate their iterative workstyle that basically requires a lot of time and attention. Different offices in different time zones = more work done on the same thing in 24 hours.
And lastly, to be fair to Sven - last year during the interview where he said that they're only doing PHB classes / content for BG3 was a key feature-lock moments of the game, where he firmly established where they were drawing the line in terms of bringing in PnP content.
I do think videogame developers (outside of the copy and paste stuff like NBA2k22) have a stronger tendency to have these scope struggles because the "canvas" in which they're doing work on is completely unconstrainted. At least for film, a TV show, or even TV commercial, no matter how much you revise your scripting, visuals, or concepts, you're still working within a very tried and true medium and are constrained by a duration (i.e. 2-3 hours max for a movie, 30 minutes for a show, etc). In a videogame, everything is up for you to decide and can be changed. The story, the duration, the gameplay, the duration, the literal engine the thing is built on. It's very easy to get lost in there.
Still, just thinking about how unbound the everything at Larian is, is mindboggling to me. But in a way it all makes sense now. All those times Sven is answering "I don't know" and "maybe" to questions about game features, he's not being cheeky and hiding things from the public at all. After watching those videos, I legitimately believe that he does not know.
