Baldur's Gate 3's lead writer worried he'd joined the dev "on the downward curve" as he "thought that Divinity: Original Sin 2 may be the best game Larian will ever make"
May. 29, 2024Adam Smith felt under a lot of pressure
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Baldur’s Gate 3’s writing director was worried he’d joined Larian on a “downward curve” after the heights of Divinity: Original Sin 2.
Game Pressurespoke to Baldur’s Gate 3 game director Swen Vincke and writing director Adam Smith at the Digital Dragons conference in Poland last week, and asked the leads if they ever expected to make one of the best RPGs in years. Vincke said he didn’t, and pointed to his recent comment where he confessed heregretted saying Baldur’s Gate 3 could be the “RPG of the decade” while it was in development.
Smith, though, was particularly mindful of Larian’s history going into Baldur’s Gate 3. “I had the double thing. There was that, what Swen said. And then I was a Larian fan before I worked for them. I thought that Divinity: Original Sin 2 may be the best game Larian will ever make. I may be the one who comes in on the downward curve. We could screw this up as well,” the writing director said.
“It was the legacy of Baldur’s Gate, the legacy ofBioware. And it was a legacy of Larian that was being created. Going into that was intimidating at times. The scariest times for me were the closer we got to launch. You could see this is so close to being brilliant and it’s not yet. I mean, there were times when we looked at it and we thought: It’s terrible,” Smith added with a laugh.
Elsewhere at Digital Dragons, Smith told GamesRadar+ thatLarian “did start pushing around ideas for Baldur’s Gate 4,“but they didn’t excite anyone at the studio. This, combined with Larian abandoning ideas it had for Baldur’s Gate 3 DLC when no one was similarly enthused, is what lead tothe studio announcing it wouldn’t be making Baldur’s Gate 4earlier this year, and would instead be making something entirely new instead.
Baldur’s Gate 3 had less crunch than Larian’s previous RPGs, but its director says “you will always have a little bit” of overtime.”
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