Baldur’s Gate III – Swen Vincke Interview

Larian’s boss Swen Vincke recently had a chat with Destructiod that revolved around Baldur’s Gate III and its ongoing early access journey. The resulting interview covers player feedback, willing and otherwise, Larian’s approach to RPG design, their vision for BG III’s early access phase, and much more.

Here’s a quick sample and you take things from there:

Larian is still working on the game, too. Vincke says the studio doesn’t have the content of the end of the game ready yet. Even if it did, Vincke doesn’t think they’ll put it all in Early Access; the studio has a “large army of testers,” and the Early Access is not its testing ground for QA. The Early Access is there for community feedback on systems, systems that are present there and will be throughout the rest of the game.

That reasoning helps give context to why the Druid was the next class in line to hit the Early Access. Druids play a pretty major role in the first hub, but when I asked Vincke why it was the latest class to enter the Early Access build, the answer surprised me a bit.

“It was one of the hardest classes to get right,” Vincke tells me. “So we wanted to put it in there to force ourselves to go through the entire process of that class, and at the same time to see what people were going to be doing with it, because we are going fairly far with what you can do with Wild Shape.”

Vincke says that Larian has ambitions, still, for what it’s going to add. Druid provides a very different experience compared to the other classes, so it’s an interesting question mark to address now, rather than later.

“So we’re not going to necessarily put the classes that are easiest to make first into [Early Access], we’re putting the ones that are interesting for us also, to see what the community does with it,” Vincke says.