Barbarians are all the rage in Larian’s next step towards its RPG’s release

Developer/publisher

Larian Studios

Format

PC, Stadia

Origin

Belgium

Release

2023

The road to Baldur’s Gate is long and hard. The first act alone – currently playable in Early Access – takes us from crashed slave barge to subterranean cult, via a goblin camp, besieged druids and fungal forests. And all this to the ticking of a time bomb: a tadpole burrowed deep in the brain that grants psychic boons as it saps the host’s humanity. Surviving all the way to the Sword Coast metropolis will be one thing; making it there as the same hero you set out as, quite another.

And so it is for Larian, which finds the route to release studded with obstacles of a different kind: the restructuring of processes to fit a pandemic-gripped world; the shift to cinematic storytelling which, married to the studio’s championing of reactive permutations, places huge demands on production; the juggling of disparate fan communities, from the BioWare old guard to a generation of D&D players raised on friendlier Fifth Edition rules. Hearing studio head Swen Vincke outline the effort required to keep atop of the challenges (the studio swelled to almost 400 staff during development), you wonder if a Mind Flayer parasite might not be a mercy by comparison.

“Certainly, the stakes are much higher, because the team is much larger and we’re spending more time in Early Access than we did with Original Sin 2, so our community is getting impatient – those are stress factors