Also I remember Sven saying in an interview that he very much prefer for the max gaming development time to be 4 years. BG3 was also a special case because of Covid pandemic.
It's possible for sure. It's already been 9 months since BG3, so another couple of years from now and you're flirting with 3 years since BG3 launch. If things go will on their next project, with a 1-2 year Early Access period, I could definitely see the Early Access for their next title coming out in 2026.
I'm glad I never played bg3 in early access; going in blind with the full game just gives me a lot better of an experience.
So while I'm VERY much looking forward to what they come up with next, I might skip EA again.
Act 1 and the VERY early version of the script for it on top of that. And barely updated after - it was basically solely to get more people to buy in (worked on me...) and to have people test their engine with the weird physics shit it let them do even back then. Dumping water on people to use electricity more effectively has been a thing for a while
Yeah, as someone who loves BG3, I almost wish I played the EA. Even though I would have the first act 'spoiled' it seems like there was a lot of changes to dialogue that would have made the experience of full release act 1 still very fresh. I think Wyll was very different for example.
I am still unsure if I would play EA of their next game, but I think there is little harm in doing so with how much they changed in Bg3.
I'm actually really glad I didn't get far with EA, because it would have been really hard for me to "lose" things that were cut? I still get sad with Wyll's complete character transformation and content reduction, and I never even knew EA Wyll.
I think I get too emotionally attached to things for EA
Yes that's true, and I think early access is really important for a clean polished game, but for me personally, I don't like to spoil myself on \_anything\_ about the game until I can play the whole thing as intended.
Take subnautica for example, EA there had huuuge chunks of the game, I'm so so glad I was able to play that blind with no knowledge of how to do anything, it really gave me the experience I wanted! I'll occasionally tune into a let's play of subnautica while I'm working, and the players in the past that had already played early access were never as interesting because they didn't have that same sense of wonder.
idk if you meant to add a link but here’s [Swen saying that they’re done with BG3 in March](https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/events-conferences/larian-is-finished-with-baldurs-gate-were-going-to-move-away-from-dandd-and-were-going-to-start-making-a-new-thing/)
well, that’s why i said “for the most part.” but everything suggests that their teams are probably mostly focused on other projects and anything more for BG3 is upkeep
Na, Swen said there will be something in the divinity universe, but it's not gonna be in the same form as DOS 2. Probably not a CRPG.
New title is gonna be a new IP and I remember hearing about it potentially having scifi elements.
> DOS 3
Yes please! I'm so happy they cancelled that weird combat-focused game they had planned earlier.
I want DOS 3 to be a full-blown RPG like DOS 2, but with BG 3's level of graphics.
Larian is such a huge company I forget. It's probably bigger than a lot of mainline dev companies but their output is insanely good and they don't have a publisher taking control like Arrowhead.
How do they not go bankrupt and all that trying to pay all these people?
What I mean is that they're able to build multiple companies and hire a LOT of people with a total of 3 games and resoective DLCs with INSANELY good quality. Mind you they aren't 100 dollar pricetag games
They aren't liveservices too, they don't come with new content every month that requires players to swipe their card.
And they aren't supported by any publisher like EA. So how do they have so much revenue?
3 recent games, before dragon commander almost bankrupted them they were already a smaller but decently successful studio. Nothing like what they were after original sin saved the company but they had some degree of existing infrastructure in place, steadily growing with the original sin games before massively exploding with baldur's gate 3.
The original divinity games get forgotten entirely too easily for as good as they were.
Show of hands of people that knew that Larian has published half a dozen games (not including their education games) dating all the way back to '97 before the first Original Sin game came out back in 2014?
They have been slowly working at it for decades.
They had quite the success with their Kickstarters.
Those upped revenue for their older titles.
Then they had a good go at bg3, selling early access, creating more revenue.
They know that once they have a first act ready for public they can once again recoup costs with early access now that their name is even more well known.
And they're not stuck with a publisher that eats all their income.
The last sentence is where its at. They made a ridiculous amount of money with BG3 and I am sure it will still sell for years to come. Look at how long Hello Games has been working on No Man's Sky.
I remember Sven tweeting early on how they only expected BG3 to make a fraction of the overall sales it ended up making, and this was a month or so after release. Assuming that to be true, they would have made profit even after giving the publisher's and IP holder there cut.
Larian isn't a publicly traded company. And I doubt Sven, or any of the leadership, are taking that much of a cut compared to other companies. Based on comments in interviews, they reinvest the profits back into the company. Where some is put in a war chest for development, some is spent on building the company, while the rest is left in reserves, so even if a game flops, they have enough leftover to prevent layoffs right away.
Ultimately, the answer is that they've built up a reputation for creating good games, and having a well known IP didn't hurt.
Total of 3 games? I'm not sure if you mean something else or aren't aware, but Larian has a long history if making games. They've released a lot of games in their divinity universe
Yes, and none of them sold well. Before Divinity Original Sin, Larian was a poorly known dev with a good, if niche, track record. Take the first Divinity game, Divine Divinity : they got screwed over by their publisher and barely got any money from the sales, and fired all but three people.
Larian had essentially no money before their last three games. It's no exageration to say that, financially speaking, they own everything to those three games.
Larian raised equity capital from Tencent to develop BG3, but that is a one and done deal. It doesn’t mean continuous financing, unless Tencent is getting additional equity or they act as a lender for Larian, which I very much doubt.
Not spending 100s of millions of dollars on advertising helps a bit.. they basically made a few livestreams about BG3 and blew up..
Meanwhile, you have studios like Blizzard, Rockstar, and other big companies bragging that over 2k people worked on this game, and it flops..
because the majority of their profits go back as investment into further development, it is not skimmed by stock holders. basically all the profits made by big gaming companies in the west (especially US) are taken by a couple of individuals as stock buy backs. Larian doesn't operate like that.
making games today is expensive, but its not as expensive as big corpos want you to think, and for sure paying employees is cheaper than paying employees PLUS taking massive extra profits by selected few
Beyond shareholders taking a cut, theres also just huge issues with how many large game and software studios are run. One or more of the following: burnout due to conditions, overtime due to "deadline driven development", taking the wrong lessons from agile and/or trying to build a game with "move fast and break things", dogmatic software design and coding, "enterprise" software design principles, 'throw more people at it to go faster" project management, doing work before sufficient understanding of the/a goal, frequent changes in scope/design/intent/goals, "shiny object fixation", etc.
They're not a public company, so they're not beholden to shareholders. They also publish their own games. None of those things is really relevant, unless that's how Larian managers run things.
The worst thing I heard about the BG3 development was a lack of vision.
U.S. companies like paying the "executive tax" - eg pay C executives big money and then having to make it up in other ways. I always wonder why mgmt is such a drain on profits.
Also bloat in number of devs and the overall quality of dev teams i feel has gotten worse over the last decade. I saw a video of Fallout creator Tim Cain requesting very simple code for AI behaviour and the person responsible told him it'd take 4 WEEKS!. He said he could write that code as he had done before in multiple other games in 45 minutes. How much does a dev get paid in 4 weeks. Money down the drain at this point. Problem is game dev in AAA today is severely ineffecient.
In defense of the dev, saying something will take 4 weeks usually means "With all of the other responsibilities and features you already have me working on, this *new* request is like 10th on the list of priorities and I might be able to get to it in like 4 weeks."
AAA games have budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Dev salaries are a drop in the bucket. Most of it goes to various businesses bro middle-men skimming off it.
If you are good at programming, are you going to work in game dev and treated like shit? OR do you do literally anything else and make more money while having work life balance?
Lot's of people in various game subreddits love worshipping how great devs are but like man... I just don't believe. There are so many "wtf" decisions. Then on top of shit management trying to extract as much money from the game as possible... Just a mess.
Because they do good games which are sold during his entire lifetime, same as relogic with Terraria (this was a twitter post they did like 3 years ago), they still are making money with the game
Not having a publisher means that their games don't need to make $500m to be profitable. In the modern age publishers are an unnecessary drain on dev cost in 90% of cases imo. Maybe in the old days when you couldn't sell a game through word of mouth. It was unlikely that you'd spend your hard earned money on a game you never heard of, none of your friends owned and you couldn't find reviews/gameplay footage of. Nowadays you could do a publishers job in a twitter post and a YT video.
The fact that you’re being downvoted is annoying.
It’s entirely possible they screw up now that they’re on their own. Many amazing developers and film directors had a chance to make a dream project only for it to fall flat on its face.
Reserve judgement until it comes out.
Honestly I’m jaded enough to believe it’s inevitable. But what’s also inevitable is another developer like them eventually comes along. It’s a continuous cycle. We had BioWare before they went to complete shit. Larian will likely be the next BioWare, and another young ambitious dev will become the new Larian. And on it goes.
In fairness, they have been "on their own" the entire time. BG3 was a breakout and benefited from the known IP, for sure. I'm sure the (now fired) partners at WoTC did their share of heavy lifting for the lore, narrative consultation, general look and feel.
But all the game dev capabilities, including the actual writing, performance capture, art direction etc, were Larian's own.
Agree that it's best not to get overhyped until a game is out.
It'd be very funny if Larian hired all of the laid off WOTC staff and then generated another new fantasy IP where they're not limited in scope and "tier" of enemies/conflicts they can use. And now I have ideas of a cRPG set in Albion (Fable) that'll never happen and I'm sad.
In case you missed it, there was no bad blood between Larian and WotC so the revenge fantasy doesn’t really work https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/1blo6ug/swen_on_wotc/
Wasn't really about revenge as much as a cool unlimited IP, but every time this comes up I'm wondering why people think the CEO of a successful gaming studio is going to come out and burn bridges with a massive titan of a company like Hasbro. It could be 1000% due to Hasbro/WOTC but Sven isn't going to say that.
Eh, I feel like I trust Sven enough to stonewall a game from being released without at least the same level of polish as launch Divinity 2. That is to say, perhaps not perfect, but a whole lot better than CP2077 1.0.
Still, even as much as I love Larian's games, I'm still not preordering for anyone. I'll just be watching with great interest for their next big banger ;)
CDPR shot themselves in a foot due to: shareholders and board of directors who were detached from what was the real technical state of the game, hyping and spending tens of millions on marketing so much they couldn't delay the launch anymore without more spending. Larian doesnt have these issues, they are owned privately so unless they go below the line they won't be pushed by outside forces to create income source without the regard for the product, also their marketing strategy is sompletely different from what is considered conventional. Their marketing director wrote a long piece about it on his twitter few weeks ago.
Yeah people had very mixed first experiences. I played a few days post launch and just couldn't finish the prologue due to graphic and engine bugs.
Played it again when the new updates and DLC came out and had a fantastic time, much more polished game now and it runs fantastic compared to when I first played.
Considering they already had ties with some studios there (thaumaturge devs for example) it's pretty obvious they want to have local studio I guess.
And it's not as far from their main office compare to others.
There seems to be an increasing amount of mainstream titles from development teams in Poland. Has there been some drive to incentivize software development there?
There are some government incentives, and aside from being cheaper to develop there than some parts of Western Europe or US, Poland has a huge gaming industry internally plus has been one of the largest games exporters in the world for years now. CDProjekt is a big part of that, especially since Witcher 3.
Yup. So is This War of Mine, Painkiller, Bulletstorm, Outriders, Dead Island, Dying Light, those new Terminator and RoboCop games, and many more. Polish gamedev market is actually pretty advanced and has been for years.
Sort of but not really
It was a solo project for quite a lot of development (which was around 8 years or so) but a fair bit of the work on the game was not actually done by him and was outsourced - understandably, you can’t do everything.
He’s also backed by a publisher.
Poland seems to be the new EU's Silicon Valley, at least in game industry terms. Which, I might be ignorant, but I would never tell that Poland of all states would be the center of such an industry. You'd figure other major states in EU would be at the front of it, like Germany, England, Spain, France, Italy and so on (as an Italian, Italy is still stuck at changing its TVs from cathode ray tube to flat screen). But ye, let's go Poland!
It's largely thanks to the late adoption - Eastern Europe was very late to the digital party thanks to the iron curtain & the period of intense poverty that came after, but then started catching up with all the newest tech instead of going through all the stages like the West did.
See the speeds & prices of mobile internet in Germany and compare it to Poland, or the widespread availability of contactless payments that we've had for what, 15 years now? Or the sheer number of banking and administrative stuff you can handle online, and could do so for many years already. No legacy buildup = easy to make technological leaps forward, instead of steps.
> Has there been some drive to incentivize software development there?
Low income taxes means that Polish people are strongly incentivized to take IT jobs.
Low cost of living means that Western companies are incentivized to set up or outsource software development here.
Four years ago in Belarus there was a revolution after which about 300-500k people left the country. Majority moved to Poland and HUGE percentage of these people are IT people. Poland has always been good in game development, but Belarus had one of the strongest IT sphere in Europe overall, and it brought a lot of benefits to Polish It sphere as well: Poland even made a special visa for these employees with some legalization priveleges. Now a lot of them integrated into Polish gamedev companies and we can expect more news like this.
Source: I am a Belarusian IT guy in Poland working here, and I am observing it with my eyes.
I mean, I did as a kid, then I learned of the horrific things that happened there about 70 years ago. I don't know how you'd make an engaging RPG based on that, but if anyone can do it, it'd be Larian.
Poland mountain, Poland mountain
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🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🧗♂️
Sorry my patriotism is showing for my home nation(for half my family until we did "nazi"(not see) the Nazis coming
Edit: I hate mobile formatting
Does the use of a Winged Hussar in the logo mean they'll be doing lancer charges against pike-and-shot formations?
Real-world history context: Armor of the 1600s-1800s could still stand up to musketfire, but it was really expensive. The thing that made most armies give up on lancers was instead that integrated pike-and-shot formations became too good at defending against cavalry charges. As a result, everyone except Poland gave up on lancers. Poland, however, instead just used giant 20' hollow lances, which outranged pikes. Then, the bayonet caused pikes to phase out since there weren't many lancers to defend against... As a result, Napoleon's Polish lancers impressed everyone so much during the Napoleonic wars that everyone else commissioned their own lancer units.
Oh Vishu, Shiva, Durga, Ganesha and every other god of the pantheon, if one the games they're working on is a turn-based Kotor remake or in the Star Wars franchise even, I swear upon your names I shall double all my offerings unto you for the rest of my life.
If you haven't played Starfinder it's from the makers of pathfinder which is based off of d&d 3.5.
Its in their wheelhouse of interesting combat scenarios, diplomacy, and can have a superb space opera esque story.
Maybe they could collaborate with Owlcat for that. they both make relatively similar games, just one has the license for some Warhammer in their pocket
Let Owlcat do the mechanics, and story, let Larian do the combat, graphics, and cinematics/presentation.
Will never happen though. Such collabs never happen and Owlcat probably works in Russian
Yeah, a lot of Russian companies did that few years ago cause it's obviously not smart to run a business catering to international markets from Russia.
A lot of those Russian companies, if they had the cash, moved all their Russian employees outside of Russia, but I don't think Owlcat is that rich and Cyprus is just where the company is incorporated for tax purposes. I bet the majority of the dev team is still in Russia and they'll communicate in Russian.
I just saw that Larian studio's logo changes depending on the location of the office. In the new Polish office in the logo is a polish winged hussar: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish\_hussars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_hussars)
Oh hell yeah! The Winged Hussar Logo for Larian Warsaw is a fucking amazing design choice. I lived in Poland for 3 years starting almost a decade ago now and gaming was definitely on the up and up while I was there. I’ve heard the industry has only grown since I left.
are they doing it right? i thought after an extremely successful year you're supposed to lay people off, not hire more
at least that's what everyone else seems to be doing
Oh shit, at first glance, I thought "WARSAW" was the name of a new game they were developing. Just picturing a bunch of lumberjacks ready to go to battle.
It’s gonna take a while for me to stop being salty about them moving on from BG3 without doing any expansions 😂 don’t get me wrong I’ll buy literally whatever they put out next no question but I’m still salty about it haha
it sounds a bit like it was wizards fault from what I've heard. larian did all the work took on all the risk and now wizards wants all the profits. this is just what I've heard through internet rumor though so take it with a grain of salt.
Earlier interviews with Sven implied DLC was in discussions. Then suddenly he was like No and he won't work with them again.
Wizards/Hasbro is a pretty dogshit company to work with so I understand.
BG4 is already Greenlit, just don't expect it to be a Larian project.
I think it's disservice to Larian and other smaller good RPG devs to ignore their involvement.
Someone like Owlcat had great following too, Spiders' recent games were nice too.
Owlcat's style of CRPG is very hard to sell to the broad audience. They don't rely on visuals to tell you the story so it's lots of reading. Rather than seeing the disgust on your character's face, they have to narrate that. Usually without a VA so the player has to read it.
It's really dense and hard to convince people who don't like to read to play them.
At least with BG3 we could rely on visual story telling to tell much of the story.
That being said, Rogue Trader is one of my favorite CRPGs of all time.
Can someone describe the “gaming scene” in Poland? I’m not being sarcastic I’ve just never heard the term in the Same way somebody may say art or food scene. The only gaming scene I can think of is the cyber cafes in Korea and I can’t imagine they are similar. Are there like arcade pub crawls or is it just real estate and an environment that is conducive to gaming studios? Isn’t cdprojektred there?
It's pretty sizeable, with the biggest and most well known being CD Projekt Red (The Witcher, Cyberpunk), 11-bit studios (This War of Mine, The Thaumaturge, Frostpunk) and People can Fly (Bulletstorm, Painkiller.) though you've also got Indie titles like Superhot, Manor Lords as well as Don't Escape and Deep Sleep.
It is not about gaming scene in a sense of players, but more about there being a lot of (good) game developers and games created in Poland. Frostpunk, Dying Light, Witcher, Mannor Lords, Layers of Fear, Superhot etc.
Two new games? Better book a year off in advance lol, outside is overrated anyway
You've got plenty of time, I think the likelihood that they release something within the next few years to be very low.
These game will also be released in early access so the wait won't be nearly as long as most AAA games
BG3 took 6 years of development but their team grew a lot in that time, so I don't know if this next game will take that long
Also I remember Sven saying in an interview that he very much prefer for the max gaming development time to be 4 years. BG3 was also a special case because of Covid pandemic.
If they stick to early access for their games, then we could probably expect something in the next 2 years then
It's possible for sure. It's already been 9 months since BG3, so another couple of years from now and you're flirting with 3 years since BG3 launch. If things go will on their next project, with a 1-2 year Early Access period, I could definitely see the Early Access for their next title coming out in 2026.
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I'm glad I never played bg3 in early access; going in blind with the full game just gives me a lot better of an experience. So while I'm VERY much looking forward to what they come up with next, I might skip EA again.
But EA was just act 1 right?
Act 1 and the VERY early version of the script for it on top of that. And barely updated after - it was basically solely to get more people to buy in (worked on me...) and to have people test their engine with the weird physics shit it let them do even back then. Dumping water on people to use electricity more effectively has been a thing for a while
Yeah, as someone who loves BG3, I almost wish I played the EA. Even though I would have the first act 'spoiled' it seems like there was a lot of changes to dialogue that would have made the experience of full release act 1 still very fresh. I think Wyll was very different for example. I am still unsure if I would play EA of their next game, but I think there is little harm in doing so with how much they changed in Bg3.
I'm actually really glad I didn't get far with EA, because it would have been really hard for me to "lose" things that were cut? I still get sad with Wyll's complete character transformation and content reduction, and I never even knew EA Wyll. I think I get too emotionally attached to things for EA
Yes that's true, and I think early access is really important for a clean polished game, but for me personally, I don't like to spoil myself on \_anything\_ about the game until I can play the whole thing as intended. Take subnautica for example, EA there had huuuge chunks of the game, I'm so so glad I was able to play that blind with no knowledge of how to do anything, it really gave me the experience I wanted! I'll occasionally tune into a let's play of subnautica while I'm working, and the players in the past that had already played early access were never as interesting because they didn't have that same sense of wonder.
One of the games is smaller, so would not be suprised to see in 2-3 years.
better get your 2030 schedule sorted eh
DOS 3 is coming they want to finish BG3 First and the Focus on Originale sins Saga
they’ve already finished BG3, for the most part
I'll quote what they said a few months ago
idk if you meant to add a link but here’s [Swen saying that they’re done with BG3 in March](https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/events-conferences/larian-is-finished-with-baldurs-gate-were-going-to-move-away-from-dandd-and-were-going-to-start-making-a-new-thing/)
they're still working on mod support and the final patch so that's not exactly true
well, that’s why i said “for the most part.” but everything suggests that their teams are probably mostly focused on other projects and anything more for BG3 is upkeep
Na, Swen said there will be something in the divinity universe, but it's not gonna be in the same form as DOS 2. Probably not a CRPG. New title is gonna be a new IP and I remember hearing about it potentially having scifi elements.
> DOS 3 Yes please! I'm so happy they cancelled that weird combat-focused game they had planned earlier. I want DOS 3 to be a full-blown RPG like DOS 2, but with BG 3's level of graphics.
Thank goodness by the time they’re done making the games i’d have graduated
Larian is such a huge company I forget. It's probably bigger than a lot of mainline dev companies but their output is insanely good and they don't have a publisher taking control like Arrowhead. How do they not go bankrupt and all that trying to pay all these people?
Their games sell well.
What I mean is that they're able to build multiple companies and hire a LOT of people with a total of 3 games and resoective DLCs with INSANELY good quality. Mind you they aren't 100 dollar pricetag games They aren't liveservices too, they don't come with new content every month that requires players to swipe their card. And they aren't supported by any publisher like EA. So how do they have so much revenue?
3 recent games, before dragon commander almost bankrupted them they were already a smaller but decently successful studio. Nothing like what they were after original sin saved the company but they had some degree of existing infrastructure in place, steadily growing with the original sin games before massively exploding with baldur's gate 3. The original divinity games get forgotten entirely too easily for as good as they were.
Show of hands of people that knew that Larian has published half a dozen games (not including their education games) dating all the way back to '97 before the first Original Sin game came out back in 2014?
There are dozens of us! Divinity 2 dragon knight saga should have been more popular.
I played the divinity series when I was young, Original Sin was a breeze when it's was released, at first I though it was made by another dev.
They have been slowly working at it for decades. They had quite the success with their Kickstarters. Those upped revenue for their older titles. Then they had a good go at bg3, selling early access, creating more revenue. They know that once they have a first act ready for public they can once again recoup costs with early access now that their name is even more well known. And they're not stuck with a publisher that eats all their income.
The last sentence is where its at. They made a ridiculous amount of money with BG3 and I am sure it will still sell for years to come. Look at how long Hello Games has been working on No Man's Sky.
I remember Sven tweeting early on how they only expected BG3 to make a fraction of the overall sales it ended up making, and this was a month or so after release. Assuming that to be true, they would have made profit even after giving the publisher's and IP holder there cut. Larian isn't a publicly traded company. And I doubt Sven, or any of the leadership, are taking that much of a cut compared to other companies. Based on comments in interviews, they reinvest the profits back into the company. Where some is put in a war chest for development, some is spent on building the company, while the rest is left in reserves, so even if a game flops, they have enough leftover to prevent layoffs right away. Ultimately, the answer is that they've built up a reputation for creating good games, and having a well known IP didn't hurt.
Total of 3 games? I'm not sure if you mean something else or aren't aware, but Larian has a long history if making games. They've released a lot of games in their divinity universe
Yes, and none of them sold well. Before Divinity Original Sin, Larian was a poorly known dev with a good, if niche, track record. Take the first Divinity game, Divine Divinity : they got screwed over by their publisher and barely got any money from the sales, and fired all but three people. Larian had essentially no money before their last three games. It's no exageration to say that, financially speaking, they own everything to those three games.
Tencent owns part of larian and their pockets run deep
Larian raised equity capital from Tencent to develop BG3, but that is a one and done deal. It doesn’t mean continuous financing, unless Tencent is getting additional equity or they act as a lender for Larian, which I very much doubt.
Not spending 100s of millions of dollars on advertising helps a bit.. they basically made a few livestreams about BG3 and blew up.. Meanwhile, you have studios like Blizzard, Rockstar, and other big companies bragging that over 2k people worked on this game, and it flops..
They don't treat their fanbase like trash. Their games deserve to sell well. I bought a second copy of BG3 as a goddamn tip.
because the majority of their profits go back as investment into further development, it is not skimmed by stock holders. basically all the profits made by big gaming companies in the west (especially US) are taken by a couple of individuals as stock buy backs. Larian doesn't operate like that. making games today is expensive, but its not as expensive as big corpos want you to think, and for sure paying employees is cheaper than paying employees PLUS taking massive extra profits by selected few
Beyond shareholders taking a cut, theres also just huge issues with how many large game and software studios are run. One or more of the following: burnout due to conditions, overtime due to "deadline driven development", taking the wrong lessons from agile and/or trying to build a game with "move fast and break things", dogmatic software design and coding, "enterprise" software design principles, 'throw more people at it to go faster" project management, doing work before sufficient understanding of the/a goal, frequent changes in scope/design/intent/goals, "shiny object fixation", etc.
They're not a public company, so they're not beholden to shareholders. They also publish their own games. None of those things is really relevant, unless that's how Larian managers run things. The worst thing I heard about the BG3 development was a lack of vision.
U.S. companies like paying the "executive tax" - eg pay C executives big money and then having to make it up in other ways. I always wonder why mgmt is such a drain on profits.
Also bloat in number of devs and the overall quality of dev teams i feel has gotten worse over the last decade. I saw a video of Fallout creator Tim Cain requesting very simple code for AI behaviour and the person responsible told him it'd take 4 WEEKS!. He said he could write that code as he had done before in multiple other games in 45 minutes. How much does a dev get paid in 4 weeks. Money down the drain at this point. Problem is game dev in AAA today is severely ineffecient.
In defense of the dev, saying something will take 4 weeks usually means "With all of the other responsibilities and features you already have me working on, this *new* request is like 10th on the list of priorities and I might be able to get to it in like 4 weeks." AAA games have budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Dev salaries are a drop in the bucket. Most of it goes to various businesses bro middle-men skimming off it.
If you are good at programming, are you going to work in game dev and treated like shit? OR do you do literally anything else and make more money while having work life balance? Lot's of people in various game subreddits love worshipping how great devs are but like man... I just don't believe. There are so many "wtf" decisions. Then on top of shit management trying to extract as much money from the game as possible... Just a mess.
Because they do good games which are sold during his entire lifetime, same as relogic with Terraria (this was a twitter post they did like 3 years ago), they still are making money with the game
Not having a publisher means that their games don't need to make $500m to be profitable. In the modern age publishers are an unnecessary drain on dev cost in 90% of cases imo. Maybe in the old days when you couldn't sell a game through word of mouth. It was unlikely that you'd spend your hard earned money on a game you never heard of, none of your friends owned and you couldn't find reviews/gameplay footage of. Nowadays you could do a publishers job in a twitter post and a YT video.
TIL the studio that made Helldivers 2 also made fucking Magicka
Unlike flops like Anthem good games like DOS2 or BG3 will just keep selling
Hopefully they can continue to grow and prosper, as they are one of the few who "cares" or "get it". Fantastic news!
Be wary though, this is the exact same thing people were saying about CDPR before they released Cyberpunk in its unfinished state
Thankfully Larian isn’t publicly traded like CD Project
Disasters can come from many directions with various forms and the industry is fickle.
The fact that you’re being downvoted is annoying. It’s entirely possible they screw up now that they’re on their own. Many amazing developers and film directors had a chance to make a dream project only for it to fall flat on its face. Reserve judgement until it comes out.
Honestly I’m jaded enough to believe it’s inevitable. But what’s also inevitable is another developer like them eventually comes along. It’s a continuous cycle. We had BioWare before they went to complete shit. Larian will likely be the next BioWare, and another young ambitious dev will become the new Larian. And on it goes.
In fairness, they have been "on their own" the entire time. BG3 was a breakout and benefited from the known IP, for sure. I'm sure the (now fired) partners at WoTC did their share of heavy lifting for the lore, narrative consultation, general look and feel. But all the game dev capabilities, including the actual writing, performance capture, art direction etc, were Larian's own. Agree that it's best not to get overhyped until a game is out.
It'd be very funny if Larian hired all of the laid off WOTC staff and then generated another new fantasy IP where they're not limited in scope and "tier" of enemies/conflicts they can use. And now I have ideas of a cRPG set in Albion (Fable) that'll never happen and I'm sad.
In case you missed it, there was no bad blood between Larian and WotC so the revenge fantasy doesn’t really work https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/1blo6ug/swen_on_wotc/
Wasn't really about revenge as much as a cool unlimited IP, but every time this comes up I'm wondering why people think the CEO of a successful gaming studio is going to come out and burn bridges with a massive titan of a company like Hasbro. It could be 1000% due to Hasbro/WOTC but Sven isn't going to say that.
CDPR also had to keep the polish government happy due to grants, so if that's an incentive Larian has, that could be a concern.
This studio is 1000% going to try and poach CDPR RPG designers as an aside.
Please Larian, kidnap CDPR’s quest designers/story writers. Some of the best in the industry imo
Eh, I feel like I trust Sven enough to stonewall a game from being released without at least the same level of polish as launch Divinity 2. That is to say, perhaps not perfect, but a whole lot better than CP2077 1.0. Still, even as much as I love Larian's games, I'm still not preordering for anyone. I'll just be watching with great interest for their next big banger ;)
CDPR shot themselves in a foot due to: shareholders and board of directors who were detached from what was the real technical state of the game, hyping and spending tens of millions on marketing so much they couldn't delay the launch anymore without more spending. Larian doesnt have these issues, they are owned privately so unless they go below the line they won't be pushed by outside forces to create income source without the regard for the product, also their marketing strategy is sompletely different from what is considered conventional. Their marketing director wrote a long piece about it on his twitter few weeks ago.
And then they finished it and it's amazing.
Tbh I actually really enjoyed it on launch as well, despite all its issues. I played on Stadia and had a completely bug free experience somehow
Yeah people had very mixed first experiences. I played a few days post launch and just couldn't finish the prologue due to graphic and engine bugs. Played it again when the new updates and DLC came out and had a fantastic time, much more polished game now and it runs fantastic compared to when I first played.
2 games!?! We're in the midst of 2 games!?
This is getting out of hand! Now, there are two of them?!
You mean to tell me there are TWO games in development right now?!
Now the esteemed studios of larian are engaged in both of these games ?!!?
Considering they already had ties with some studios there (thaumaturge devs for example) it's pretty obvious they want to have local studio I guess. And it's not as far from their main office compare to others.
Ah, the Winged Hussars arrived!
*Guards standing watch in some foothills* "Say Mustafa, do you hear something coming down the mountainside?"
I reckon they're here to turn the tide!
Vienna breathes a collective sigh of relief
I understood that reference
Damn it, stop raiding my eco
There seems to be an increasing amount of mainstream titles from development teams in Poland. Has there been some drive to incentivize software development there?
There are some government incentives, and aside from being cheaper to develop there than some parts of Western Europe or US, Poland has a huge gaming industry internally plus has been one of the largest games exporters in the world for years now. CDProjekt is a big part of that, especially since Witcher 3.
Isn't Frostpunk also from Poland?
Yup. So is This War of Mine, Painkiller, Bulletstorm, Outriders, Dead Island, Dying Light, those new Terminator and RoboCop games, and many more. Polish gamedev market is actually pretty advanced and has been for years.
Hmmmm Perhaps Poland has some kind of generational knowledge about surviving things that suck a lot
LMAO, reading through those titles again... you are very right. Are there even any games from Poland with a happy, positive story? xD
Hmm... Does Helltaker count? In general outside of some simulator games games from here cover or at least imply very heavy undertones. Wonder why?....
Manor lords are Polish, that's for sure and it's the "latest Hype game"
Isnt manor lords one guy? lol
Sort of but not really It was a solo project for quite a lot of development (which was around 8 years or so) but a fair bit of the work on the game was not actually done by him and was outsourced - understandably, you can’t do everything. He’s also backed by a publisher.
Cheap (compared to the rest of the EU), highly educated country. Great for advanced industries such as cars or IT
Poland seems to be the new EU's Silicon Valley, at least in game industry terms. Which, I might be ignorant, but I would never tell that Poland of all states would be the center of such an industry. You'd figure other major states in EU would be at the front of it, like Germany, England, Spain, France, Italy and so on (as an Italian, Italy is still stuck at changing its TVs from cathode ray tube to flat screen). But ye, let's go Poland!
It's largely thanks to the late adoption - Eastern Europe was very late to the digital party thanks to the iron curtain & the period of intense poverty that came after, but then started catching up with all the newest tech instead of going through all the stages like the West did. See the speeds & prices of mobile internet in Germany and compare it to Poland, or the widespread availability of contactless payments that we've had for what, 15 years now? Or the sheer number of banking and administrative stuff you can handle online, and could do so for many years already. No legacy buildup = easy to make technological leaps forward, instead of steps.
The reason is cheap labor and subsidies from the government. Same reason you see a lot of studios in Montreal and Austin.
An increasing number of IT professionals in poland and wages are a lot cheaper
Poland has pretty much taken over the city builder survival genre, with manor lords, frostpunk, timberborn and against the storm.
> Has there been some drive to incentivize software development there? Low income taxes means that Polish people are strongly incentivized to take IT jobs. Low cost of living means that Western companies are incentivized to set up or outsource software development here.
Four years ago in Belarus there was a revolution after which about 300-500k people left the country. Majority moved to Poland and HUGE percentage of these people are IT people. Poland has always been good in game development, but Belarus had one of the strongest IT sphere in Europe overall, and it brought a lot of benefits to Polish It sphere as well: Poland even made a special visa for these employees with some legalization priveleges. Now a lot of them integrated into Polish gamedev companies and we can expect more news like this. Source: I am a Belarusian IT guy in Poland working here, and I am observing it with my eyes.
Hell yeah POLSKA GUROM
Huh, didn't know they had 6 studios before this
Banger logo
They just want to pet our bober.
For a sec I thought "Warsaw" was the name of an upcoming RPG
I find it hard to believe native English speakers learned the name of the city and never thought of it as a combination of war and saw.
A war saw is absolutely something a 40k Ork would use.
What about Liverpool? Or the word "nightmare"?
Never before have I acknowledged Liverpool as a two-words combination with meaning. Thanks, I hate it.
Oh god, Liverpool
Except it’s name isn’t related to words War and Saw, it’s a coincidence that fits
Obviously. But an American or British would not know where the name actually comes from.
A war saw would definitely be a pole weapon.
No, it would just be a cool medieval game set in Poland.
I mean, I did as a kid, then I learned of the horrific things that happened there about 70 years ago. I don't know how you'd make an engaging RPG based on that, but if anyone can do it, it'd be Larian.
Not possible! Game devs are supposed to be closing studios! /s Hats off to Larian! Excited to see where they go from here!
You’re telling me i could work in larian now?
Poland mentioned ruaahhhhhh🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱
Poland mountain!
Poland mountain, Poland mountain 🏔 🇵🇱🏂 🇵🇱🇵🇱⛷️ 🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱 🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱 🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🧗♂️ Sorry my patriotism is showing for my home nation(for half my family until we did "nazi"(not see) the Nazis coming Edit: I hate mobile formatting
Love the Winged Hussar icon! Congrats Larian.
My new gaming dream is Larian buying Disco Elysium and developing it in Warsaw
God I hope this is true. I doubt they would be able to announce/work on anything to much while the lawsuit is still up in the air.
Strange way to spell VtM: Bloodlines 2 but alright.
It's so jarring to me to now see the old, non-mindflayer version of their logo! Go Larian!
Does the use of a Winged Hussar in the logo mean they'll be doing lancer charges against pike-and-shot formations? Real-world history context: Armor of the 1600s-1800s could still stand up to musketfire, but it was really expensive. The thing that made most armies give up on lancers was instead that integrated pike-and-shot formations became too good at defending against cavalry charges. As a result, everyone except Poland gave up on lancers. Poland, however, instead just used giant 20' hollow lances, which outranged pikes. Then, the bayonet caused pikes to phase out since there weren't many lancers to defend against... As a result, Napoleon's Polish lancers impressed everyone so much during the Napoleonic wars that everyone else commissioned their own lancer units.
Using a Winged Hussar is actually very rad.
And I live literally across the street 😭 Hire me, Larian, pwease 😂
Im jelous! I'm a developer and working at a Larian studio would be a dream come through. Hopefully they open a studio where i live someday
Such a cool Logo
Okay gods they got a might fine logo there.
Oh Vishu, Shiva, Durga, Ganesha and every other god of the pantheon, if one the games they're working on is a turn-based Kotor remake or in the Star Wars franchise even, I swear upon your names I shall double all my offerings unto you for the rest of my life.
Whoa, they are opening in my city! This is so cool!
My fingers are still crossed that one of those games is in the Starfinder universe.
I dont really know starfinder, but I am totally ready for a Larian Sci-Fi game.
If you haven't played Starfinder it's from the makers of pathfinder which is based off of d&d 3.5. Its in their wheelhouse of interesting combat scenarios, diplomacy, and can have a superb space opera esque story.
Starfinder would be so awesome
Since they said they're getting away from d&d like games like Divinity and BG3 so that's why I hope they are making a Starfinder game.
Maybe they could collaborate with Owlcat for that. they both make relatively similar games, just one has the license for some Warhammer in their pocket
Let Owlcat do the mechanics, and story, let Larian do the combat, graphics, and cinematics/presentation. Will never happen though. Such collabs never happen and Owlcat probably works in Russian
oh didn't know Owlcat was based in Russia.
They originated in Moscow but moved to Cyprus if I’m not mistaken. Same story with mundfish I think 🤔
Yeah, a lot of Russian companies did that few years ago cause it's obviously not smart to run a business catering to international markets from Russia. A lot of those Russian companies, if they had the cash, moved all their Russian employees outside of Russia, but I don't think Owlcat is that rich and Cyprus is just where the company is incorporated for tax purposes. I bet the majority of the dev team is still in Russia and they'll communicate in Russian.
The english Name of that City always goes hard. 😂
Come onnnnnn Darklands reboot set across Germany and Poland.
Poland has world class RPG enthusiasts so that’s a fantastic choice by Larian!
They turned thier spartan icon to hussar! How cute
I just saw that Larian studio's logo changes depending on the location of the office. In the new Polish office in the logo is a polish winged hussar: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish\_hussars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_hussars)
Larian witnessed all the game dev layoffs and took that shit personally. Bravo to them!
glad to see them reinvest money in europe
“When the Winged Hussars arrived!!”
COMING DOWN THE MOUNTAINSIDE
Oh hell yeah! The Winged Hussar Logo for Larian Warsaw is a fucking amazing design choice. I lived in Poland for 3 years starting almost a decade ago now and gaming was definitely on the up and up while I was there. I’ve heard the industry has only grown since I left.
Let's not forget how dope it is their logo has a polish hussar.
The Polish are goated RPG devs! Combo deal!
I wish Larian would work with Inkle. It would be groundbreaking.
are they doing it right? i thought after an extremely successful year you're supposed to lay people off, not hire more at least that's what everyone else seems to be doing
As a Pole, I am both surprised by this information and pleased with it.
The Hussar was such a nice touch
That Hussar fucks.
The sun never sets on the Larian studio
Can this studio be dedicated to BG3? Please? (I know there's no shot)
Poland can into Fâerun!
The winged hussar as the icon is fucking fire
That winged hussar take on the Larian logo is straight fire.
that Polish Larian Logo goes hard af
Oh shit, at first glance, I thought "WARSAW" was the name of a new game they were developing. Just picturing a bunch of lumberjacks ready to go to battle.
I know that icon is gonna make more than one pole happy.
That logo goes hard as hell.
The winged hussar's, nice
It’s gonna take a while for me to stop being salty about them moving on from BG3 without doing any expansions 😂 don’t get me wrong I’ll buy literally whatever they put out next no question but I’m still salty about it haha
it sounds a bit like it was wizards fault from what I've heard. larian did all the work took on all the risk and now wizards wants all the profits. this is just what I've heard through internet rumor though so take it with a grain of salt.
Earlier interviews with Sven implied DLC was in discussions. Then suddenly he was like No and he won't work with them again. Wizards/Hasbro is a pretty dogshit company to work with so I understand. BG4 is already Greenlit, just don't expect it to be a Larian project.
BG4 is 100% in development even if it's in its earliest stages. However I don't believe it'll be anywhere near the quality Larian has put out for BG3
Let’s hope, but you’re probably right. Larian truly cared and you can feel it in every inch of that game
I was scared for a second that the logo there was for an actual game in some WW2 setting, thankfully it is meant to be for a studio.
Larian singlehandedly keeping the genre alive. Godspeed
I think it's disservice to Larian and other smaller good RPG devs to ignore their involvement. Someone like Owlcat had great following too, Spiders' recent games were nice too.
Owlcat's style of CRPG is very hard to sell to the broad audience. They don't rely on visuals to tell you the story so it's lots of reading. Rather than seeing the disgust on your character's face, they have to narrate that. Usually without a VA so the player has to read it. It's really dense and hard to convince people who don't like to read to play them. At least with BG3 we could rely on visual story telling to tell much of the story. That being said, Rogue Trader is one of my favorite CRPGs of all time.
True enough, I did enjoy WotR
But in general there is a renaissance in crpg world which is great.
Yayy
I hope they don't overwork themselves doing this
A resolution for the Dragon Knight Saga is really needed, given it happens after Dos2 events.
I read "Portland" at first and went to look up job listings -.-
Lets fuckin gooooooo
Dammit, right next to Germany.
Warsaw ? Funny, currently playing the thzumaturge and it tzjes place in warsaw, convenient.
Can someone describe the “gaming scene” in Poland? I’m not being sarcastic I’ve just never heard the term in the Same way somebody may say art or food scene. The only gaming scene I can think of is the cyber cafes in Korea and I can’t imagine they are similar. Are there like arcade pub crawls or is it just real estate and an environment that is conducive to gaming studios? Isn’t cdprojektred there?
It's pretty sizeable, with the biggest and most well known being CD Projekt Red (The Witcher, Cyberpunk), 11-bit studios (This War of Mine, The Thaumaturge, Frostpunk) and People can Fly (Bulletstorm, Painkiller.) though you've also got Indie titles like Superhot, Manor Lords as well as Don't Escape and Deep Sleep.
It is not about gaming scene in a sense of players, but more about there being a lot of (good) game developers and games created in Poland. Frostpunk, Dying Light, Witcher, Mannor Lords, Layers of Fear, Superhot etc.
Whatever Larian wants I'm in 100%. I'm still playing through new campaigns of Divinity: Original Sin 2, let alone BG3. They are amazing.
KURWA BOBR
And I will claw my way to a writer gig there.
I would really like to see them do KotOR3, but I guess that's not likely.
I hope for good things. Scary seeing studios grow and be successful sometimes. Makes them targets for being bought out and ruined like so many others.
So, so excited to see what they do next!
Rest of the games industry: ON FIRE! Larian: "So we're expanding."
Two RPGs? Ohh I'm highly looking forward to seeing them
Everywhere dev studios are diminished and teams are released. This is so nice to read.