Larian Studios

“don’t lose the institutional knowledge” — here Swen tells the managers how incompetent they are *at their job*. Not just that they are no nice people, but that they are bad managers. In terms of money.

Baldur's Gate 3 Keeps Winning &... s Publishers for State of the Industry

Thank you for this. A lot.

Our man is a legend.

I just bought DOS2 for me and my girlfriend, we are having a blast!

Swen is absolutely right, because know-how, skills, expertise, experience and habitus have "two legs", i.e. they are and remain primarily person-bound. Management that does not understand and appreciate this deserves nothing but failure (in the long term)!


"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." - https://www.ign.com/articles/baldur...t-foregoing-dlc-aaa-development-and-more

Even though it wasn't easy, Swen did his best for his teams and also admitted his own mistakes. Big kudos!

Well, I am perfectly fine with Larian not doing a BG3 expansion, or BG4. Especially if they carefully wrap up BG3 so its well playable and moddable, I just dont see what anyone would complain about.

Many of my favorite games of all time, such as for example Vampire: Bloodlines, never saw such a careful finalization.

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And yes D&D may not be easy to implement. But AD&D was even much harder to do than D&D5. The AD&D implementation in BG1 and BG2 is VERY incomplete. Not that BG3's D&D5 implementation would actually be complete; for example again we cannot actually scribe scrolls outselves, and where the heck did wands go ?

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I am not sure what "great" ideas Larian may have for their future games.

In general what I want from a combat system is what we got in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes: ca 50-100 abilities per class, the situation was dynamic (for example critical hits openend finisher lines, and successfull parry could also open special abilities, and various abilities could inflict conditions on the opponent which other players could exploit, etc) and you had to actually think what ability to best use next.

WoW did something compareable, except less involved.

On that topic I hate skillbased because in comparison to classbased, you never get the same level of complexity, in fact usually the systems are downright primitive. And its always harder to balance, too.

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P.s.: And yes I'm certainly curious what Larian will do next. We know one of their next projects will be science fiction. I'd certainly be interested in a wellmade SF game.

Oh, thank you. I haven't seen this interview before, thanks for the link.

Thanks for the link, I haven't seen this interview either.