Mark Darrah, a former longtime developer at BioWare who served as executive producer on Dragon Age Origins, 2, and Inquisition, has some words of wisdom for the Baldur's Gate 3 devs Larian Studios. He believes the company's taking a bit of a risk with Divinity, but it's avoiding mistakes his former employer made in the process.
"The question I would have for Larian is did their core shift with Baldur's Gate 3?" he says on The Examined Game podcast. "Did they take a big step, with meaning to or not, to a different place? And is that new place where they actually want to be now?"
He mentions this in light of the Divinity trailer, where the fiery next chapter in Larian's homegrown series is teased in typically dour fashion. "If I'm a Baldur's Gate person and the only Larian game I've ever played is Baldur's Gate 3, I think some people are going to look at that trailer and go 'what, what?' and it's not that it's not true to what Larian was, but it might not be true to what Larian is," he comments.
I think what he's getting at is whether the core audience has shifted. Are there now a bunch of Dungeons & Dragons fans a bit unsure of Divinity? And is Larian alright with that potential dissonance? Fair questions – after putting out a hit like the third Baldur's Gate, you need to tread lightly, to an extent, and figure out who your community is now.
That said, Darrah believes the team has already avoided pitfalls BioWare fell into. "Larian's doing something that BioWare never did, it's very much deciding to be one thing at a time," he muses.
The studio is focusing on one major project at any given time, rather than juggling series like BioWare did, where you had Mass Effect and Dragon Age installments coming out concurrently. "There's a lot of risk involved in that," he adds, but he believes it gives the devs a stronger core.
"The power of that is there's never a moment where your studio is branching into two different things and slowly evolving away from itself," he says. "And then you're trying to force those two things back together again, and it's bouncing off itself along the way."
Certainly, if Larian can avoid the problems of Mass Effect: Andromeda and Dragon Age: The Veilguard, it'll be doing well.
