For those interested, here it is.



My personal highlights and thought :

Originally Posted by Interview
"I never expected us to be 400 people to make BG3," Vincke told me. "Nobody expected it. But it's literally what we needed to do it. We had a choice. There was a moment where we started understanding what we needed to do to make this game. We thought we understood. Then we actually really understood. And so we had two choices: we could scale it down, or we could scale ourselves up. And so we chose to scale ourselves up."

I didn't know Larian before BG3. But with the GDC talk on the making of D:OS2, and now this, I feel that if I was to summarise Larian in one phrase, it would be "we never expected development to happen this way. Nobody saw it coming". Which is quite sad.


Originally Posted by Interview
I asked Vincke where he thinks BG3 fits within the broader D&D landscape, in all its forms, and the answer came easily. "The benchmark incarnation of 5th Edition in a videogame," he said. "That's what we're trying to do. I think it's already very good, and it's still getting better."

Well, I've ordered my popcorn and I'm waiting for the next round of the Solasta vs BG3 debate. At this point, I might believe you if you told me that Swen really just wants to troll a good part of the community.


Originally Posted by Interview
Cinematics were a huge complicating factor that affected everything else in the game, even dramatically impacting the writing process. On Original Sin 2, the writers could tinker with text until essentially the last minute, thanks to an automated pipeline they built that would send new text straight to the recording studios for actors to record the next day. But that doesn't work when every dialogue scene is meticulously animated—writing has gone from one of the first steps in the process to one of the last.

"There are so many steps in between now, so many people that need to look at it," Vincke said. "Cinematic designers, cinematic animators, the casting director, lighting, VFX, SFX. So you don't just add a line like that anymore. You're very aware of your cinematic budget, the cost, and the waterfall that follows from it. We've had to reinvent ourselves, how we work… so that we can still iterate."

I'm now less hopeful than ever about the writing.

Larian's development philosophy seems to be "let's not spend time thinking ahead at the beginning, we'll just do a quick-and-dirty first draft now, implement it, and later we'll iterate over and over until we've got something good". The thing is, spending more time thinking ahead at the beginning can often save many iterations further down the line ...

Last edited by Drath Malorn; 24/03/22 12:51 AM.
Flash info : The Dark Urge is not an Origin Character. And it's not a new concept.