Baldur's Gate 3 studio CEO says that if he couldn't make a D&D game, Fallout and Ultima were the only other RPG licenses he would have considered instead : "There was not a lot to choose from"

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"I felt like there was a glass ceiling that we wouldn't be able to break through unless we had triple-A production values"

Baldur's Gate 3
(Image credit: Larian Studios)

It's hard to imagine any other studio delivering Baldur's Gate 3, but Larian CEO Swen Vincke says the Wizards of the Coast property was one of just three household RPG names he was angling to work on.

"It would have been Ultima, it would have been Fallout, it would have been Baldur's Gate. There was not a lot to choose from," Vincke tells Edge 400 about the big names he thought Larian needed to elevate it on the industry stage, once upon a time. Larian never did get its hands on the Bethesda franchise, but the rich D&D setting of the Sword Coast proved ample opportunity to further the studio's ambitions. 

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Following the shutdown of original developer Black Isle Studios, the popular Baldur's Gate license was sitting untouched with D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast. "It's one of those IPs that you know a lot of people will want to work on. So it would be great for attracting other people to the studio," explains Vincke of his reasoning at the time. "I felt like there was a glass ceiling that we wouldn't be able to break through unless we had triple-A production values, budget, marketing, all the triple A things.

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Elsewhere in the interview, Vincke discussed the impact of those production values, and how they fitted into the game's pipeline, particularly when it came to cinematics. "From where I was sitting, coming back to my strategic vision for Larian, [cinematics] made perfect sense. If we were going to bring a game like Original Sin 2 to larger crowds, we would need to have triple-A production values, whatever that takes. Because it's only then that we're going to discover if there's a market for this type of game." 

If the myriad awards, nominations, and accolades that Baldur's Gate 3 has received in the last year alone are any indication, it would seem that the market for "this type of game" is well and truly thriving.

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Jasmine Gould-Wilson
Jasmine Gould-Wilson
Senior Staff Writer, GamesRadar+

Jasmine is a Senior Staff Writer at GamesRadar+. Raised in Hong Kong and having graduated with an English Literature degree from Queen Mary, University of London, she started her games journalism career as a freelancer with TheGamer and Tech Radar Gaming before joining GamesRadar+ full-time in 2023. As part of the Features team, her duties include attending game previews and key international conferences such as Gamescom and Digital Dragons in between regular interviews, opinion pieces, and the occasional news or guides stint. In her spare time, you'll likely find Jasmine thinking/talking about Resident Evil, purchasing another book she's unlikely to read, or complaining about the weather.