Baldur’s Gate 3 won so many awards that it started to “affect development”, forcing Larian to send “rotating teams” of devs to ceremonies
Baldur’s Gate 3 was such a massive critical success that sending developers to collect all of its awards was starting to “affect development.”
Speaking to Edge, Larian CEO and Baldur’s Gate 3 director Swen Vincke said that the game’s overwhelming awards success was greatly appreciated, but began to cause a problem. “It affects development – there’s a lot of them. This has been a real problem.” Sending a team of developers out to one awards show is one thing, but when it became clear that Baldur’s gate 3 was going to keep winning, Larian started sending “rotating teams” to collect those awards – “different people went to different award shows.”
Vincke says that the game’s level of success was at risk of being “too much,” and that while “it’s great that you have a moment of celebration […] we still have award shows that we’re going to. Because they’re important, and we really appreciate it.”
Nevertheless, the director says it “would be cool if everybody could agree to do it all at the same time,” because “it is surprisingly draining on the soul.” That drain is certainly something Vincke didn’t expect to experience, but he says the continuing attention being paid to the game means that “we’ve all been more emotional because we can’t get closure. And you want to have closure at the end of a project.”
Vincke has discussed his desire to have that closure a couple of times, suggesting that he’s very nearly done talking about Baldur’s Gate 3 in public. Instead, he’s keen to “focus on new things,” namely the two other RPGs that Larian is already working on. Still, that closure is clearly hard to come by – Baldur’s Gate 3’s record-breaking awards run technically came to an end in April, but Larian was still picking up awards for the game as of this week. Now that we’re approaching a year after release, that’s an impressive feat, but it’s also likely to have meant more travel than a man who’s trying to run a studio would ideally have undertaken.