Damn, what a journey it’s been for Baldur’s Gate 3, hasn’t it? It feels like just yesterday I was jealous of Matthew Castle for previewing the sequel to his beloved Shadows Of Amn (a peaceful RPS). Fast forward a few moves, and it’s been a year since Larian’s RPG boom officially launched, and strangers in pubs are now much more likely to understand why my failed youthful romance with Jaheira was such a heartbreaking experience. Baldur’s Gate 3 itself is seemingly done and dusted after the upcoming patch, but Larian is now gearing up for its next charm offensive with a new “community-focused” YouTube channel, dropping more hints about their two games currently in development.
Following the naming convention of the occasional hype-casts on Panel From Hell, The Channel From Hell is being promoted as an anniversary celebration. It's currently sitting empty, but videos are expected to be on the way soon. They say it'll be community-focused, so part of the channel's purpose could be to showcase some of the crazy mods that will follow the release of Patch 7's modding toolkit. I wouldn't be surprised if they also put out some sort of “thirst posts of the week” section — an endless source of content if I've ever seen one.
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Elsewhere, Larian is currently working on two new games. In May, they announced the opening of a new Polish studio based in Warsaw, in addition to their 24-hour development cycle. “Our plan for the Polish studio is very simple,” said CEO Swen Vincke. “Build a team that can work on our two – very ambitious – new RPGs and enjoy the fruits of their labor.”
“The machine is designed to make big games,” Vincke recently told PC Gamer. “We actually know what we want from our game systems, how to evolve them, how to do new things… and it's all big.” In the same interview, Vincke mentioned that this approach – an approach that seems to carry over from Baldur's Gate 3 – was only possible because of the studio's independence.
“If you see that, it scares you, as a shareholder, as a publisher, the first thing you're going to try to do is contain it — you're going to try to contain it, you're going to try to box it in, you're going to try to control it, which is exactly the opposite of what we want to do. Because it's like, why are we spending a million dollars on a dragon that no one is going to see, except for five people who are just making this vague choice? Because if they see it, they have to be happy, too. That's why I put the bloody dragon in there, because that's the logical conclusion of what they're doing.”
While many of us would have loved to see a full Throne Of Bhaal-style expansion for BG3, it's clear that moving on to these new projects has revitalized a studio that was on the verge of burning out on the Dungeons And Dragons landscape. Vincke told PC Gamer that he felt “we've never felt better as developers” after deciding to move on. “You can't really explain or express how much freedom we have, to be honest. So morale is very high, just because we're doing new things again. We're doing our own thing again, not repeating, not trying to remake the rules from 50 years ago into something new.”