Baldur’s Gate 3 was one of the best games of 2023 and easily one of the year’s biggest success stories. And as you might expect, all that acclaim and adoration saw the game winning a lot of awards at various shows and events. According to the game’s director, being showered with so many accolades actually started causing some problems for the studio.
First released in early access in 2020, Baldur’s Gate 3 didn’t explode in popularity until its full release in August 2023. At that point, millions of people hopped into the dense RPG—which is based on Dungeons & Dragons rules and settings—and fell in love with its characters, writing, choices, and turn-based combat. So it wasn’t too surprising that in November 2023, Baldur’s Gate 3 walked away with Ultimate Game of the Year at the Golden Joystick Awards. And then it went on to win so many other awards across big and small events. It even did something never seen before—winning all five major Game of the Year Awards given out by the industry. But all those awards, while appreciated, have led to developer Larian Studios having to send out devs to keep picking them up, which in turn led to some development problems.
In an interview with Edge, as reported by GamesRadar, Larian CEO and Baldur’s Gate 3 director Swen Vincke admitted that all the awards interfered a bit with the studio’s work.
“It affects development—there’s a lot of them,” Vincke said. “This has been a real problem.” According to the director, once the team realized they were going to keep winning so many awards, they started “rotating teams” and sending out “different people” to all the award shows to avoid one part of the studio losing too much development progress.
Vincke said that Baldur’s Gate 3‘s success was nearly “too much.” But the team still sent people to all the award shows because “they’re important” and the developers “really appreciate” all the support and praise.
Still, Vincke did suggest that it would be “cool if everybody could agree to” hold award shows around the “same time” as it can actually be “surprisingly draining on the soul.”
“[All of us at Larian have] been more emotional because we can’t get closure. And you want to have closure at the end of a project,” said Vincke.
Hopefully, now that enough time has passed, Baldur’s Gate 3 will stop winning awards and the fanbase will calm down and let Larian move on to its other projects, which aren’t connected to the Dungeons & Dragons RPG franchise at all.
In March 2024 at GDC, Vincke said this about Baldur’s Gate 3 and what happens next for the game and series:
We’re not going to make new expansions, which everybody is expecting us to do. We’re not going to make Baldur’s Gate 4, which everybody is expecting us to do. We’re going to move on. We’re going to move away from D&D, and we’re going to start making a new thing.
I’m saying it here because I have a forum and [we’re getting] bombarded by people that expect us to do these things, but that’s not for us. It’s going to be up to Wizards of the Coast, because it’s their IP, to find somebody to take over the torch. We think we did our job and so, for us, it’s time to get a new puppy.
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