Larian Studios enjoyed massive success with Baldur’s Gate 3, and expectations are high for the team’s next game. Larian CEO Swen Vincke said in a new interview that following up that highly regarded and commercially successful game is “very stressy” for the studio.
He told IGN that “expectations are incredibly high.” With that in mind, Vincke said he told his team, “‘Just follow your gut, and we’ll see where we end up.'”
He said he tried to impress upon his staffers that they should not be afraid to fail. In fact, it’s essential to stumble in the creative process, he said.
“It’s OK to fail–failure has always been in the DNA of the studio; failing is part of creativity, and we have to remember that,” he said. “I’m happy that we’re out of the circus now and we can focus on what we’re doing.”
Vincke went on to say that he hopes Larian’s next game can be “something you would be proud to show your friends, and something that you would want to play.”
“That’s the core. If that’s there, we’ll be fine,” he said. “These are very talented and skilled people, so if you give them freedom and trust them to do their best, you can’t go wrong.”
Larian has bold ambitions for its future projects, and the company’s next game is codenamed Excalibur. It sounds like it’s still very early days, as Vincke said earlier this year that the team is still “trying to figure out what the hell it is.”
What is confirmed is that the studio is not making Baldur’s Gate 4 next. “We want to do big, new things. We don’t want to rehash the thing that we’ve done already,” Vincke said earlier this year.
Given the huge success of Baldur’s Gate 3, the series is likely to continue with a different developer. Hasbro, which owns the IP, has said it hopes to release Baldur’s Gate 4 by 2050.
