Baldur's Gate 3 director turned his back on RTS for RPG at the start of his career - just before the strategy game boom that brought us StarCraft, Homeworld, and Age of Empires
Aug. 19, 2024Swen Vincke thought “RTS was not something people were going to be interested in”
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Baldur’s Gate 3director Swen Vincke says that he “stupidly” turned his back on the real-time strategy genre in the late 1990s, just before it exploded in popularity.
Speaking toBAFTA, Vincke is asked which games drove his desire to make games himself. One of those is the Ultima series, which should come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever heard Vincke talk about his favorite games - the Ultima series is a foundational pillar of modern RPG design, and Vincke has long espoused his fondness for it.
“My first game was an RTS,” Vincke says, “but then I stupidly decided that RTSs were not something that people were going to be interested in, so I should make something really complicated like an RPG.” That RPG was Divine Divinity, which eventually led toDivinity: Original Sin, the success of which, Vincke says, was the highlight of his career.
While his CRPG success means that Vincke probably isn’t too sad that he made the pivot to RPGs, it’s hard to overstate how bad his apparent misread of the industry was back in the mid-90s, a time when many of thebest strategy gamesof all time were spinning up. The L.E.D. Wars was released in December 1997, shortly after both the first Age of Empires game and the first game inBungie’s Myth series. The following year would see the release of the first Anno game, as well as StarCraft, while 1999 would see the arrival of Homeworld, the second Command & Conquer game, and Age of Empires 2. Around the same time, strategy alternatives like Hearts of Iron and Europa Universalis were just starting to take off, while the new millennium would continue RTS supremacy. While the genre eventually spun out into a series of different ideas and has found less mainstream success since its 2000s heyday, it was a true juggernaut in the years after Vincke decided to turn his back on it. Hindsight, of course, is 20/20, but perhaps it’s best for all of us that it was Vincke’s other major inspiration that would drive his greatest success.
Elsewhere in his chat with BAFTA, Vincke reveals that"I was in love with Morrigan in Dragon Age," and suddenly I understand why Baldur’s Gate 3 is filled with bad girls.
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I’m GamesRadar’s news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I’ve run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam’s latest indie hit.
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