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Larian is one of the premier RPG developers active today, with 2023's undisputed GOTY Baldur's Gate 3 cementing its legacy as one of the big genre titans. That's a fact not lost on former Obsidian senior designer Chris Avellone, who attributes much of Larian's reputation for quality to studio founder, CEO, and Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke.
Avellone worked with Vincke on Larian's Divinity: Original Sin 2 as a freelancer, and it seems he learned a thing or two about Vincke's management style during that time. Talking to Fallout content creator TKs-Mantis, Avellone says Vincke accepts nothing less than the very best for the games he makes.
"Swen at Larian, Swen is an unstoppable machine. If a game comes out, it is incredibly important to him that it's at high quality, no matter what sacrifice it takes," says Avellone. "He will have engines re-written to make sure that the quality is there ... That quality reputation builds with every game that you're doing."
Himself a veteran RPG developer, Avellone was a designer on the seminal RPG Planescape: Torment, a lead designer on Fallout 2, and senior designer on Fallout: New Vegas. He left Obsidian in 2015 under contentious terms and continued contributing to various projects, including Prey and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.
Vincke, meanwhile, is presumably hard at work on Larian's new Divinity game, which was announced at last year's Game Awards. We don't know a whole lot about the upcoming RPG beyond its delightfully gruesome reveal trailer, but it sounds like an absolute beast of a game, with The Game Awards host Geoff Keighley having said it'll be even bigger than Baldur's Gate 3.
