Larian’s “follow your heart” attitude is what worries me about the possibility of this game having no future. Swen himself has said that their approach to development is both the cause for their successes and their failures. He’s explained that when Larian was first making a name for itself, they almost had to file bankruptcy and shut down because of money issues. But now we see that following their hearts is what brought BG3 so much success. Unfortunately, it seems like Larian’s development process is very much built on an approach of only looking to the future instead of the past, which heavily clashes with the way I view creative projects.

I find it difficult to believe that every single employee at Larian threw their hands up in the air and shouted with joy after being told they wouldn’t work on Baldur’s Gate anymore. Obviously, creative passion ebbs and flows during the process of working on something, and it’s completely normal for artists to set a project aside and work on something else that speaks to them more in that moment. But of course, most artists are going to eventually have the desire back to finish that set aside project. There’s absolutely some devs at Larian who saw all the praise the game received and had it further ignite their love for the game and their desire to make it even better.

It almost feels like Larian, as a private company that doesn’t have shareholders or a board of executives or anything, is forced to follow wherever the whims of Swen lead them without there being any other input. Of course Swen, for all his great qualities as a leader because of his stance on placing quality and care over profits, seems to possess some weird mindset of throwing things in the trash once they get a bit boring and singlemindedly dedicating himself to something new and shiny. And so I fear that even though down the line, there will likely be a bigger part of the audience that gets tired of the state of BG3 and wants more (giving Larian a reason to return to the game), it will never happen. The requests will just fall on deaf ears as Swen says “Why would we go back? We made the game and everybody loved it and gave it awards! Now people can look at all the cool original ideas I came up with on my own instead of playing more Dungeons and Dragons!”