And yeah, Swen said that WotC gave them a lot of free reign to make the game the way they wanted to. I didn’t interpret that as a non-interference clause though. I think it’s probably more likely that WotC just thought they were doing a good job and let Larian do it’s thing. They are the ones who approached Larian to make this game (after rejecting Swen’s initial pitch years prior).
If Games Workshop of all companies was willing to fork over as much creative control to CA as they did for the Total Warhammer series I can believe just about any company would be willing to be surprisingly hands-off when handing their IPs out to studios now, I suspect in no small part due to how explosively successful GW has been through Total Warhammer under that policy. No big company sitting on a potentially lucrative IP that would mesh well with the video game format can look at that and not think "We want that too." anymore.
