"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."founder and head of Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian, while collecting Game Developers' Choice award for Best Narrative last week."I've been fighting publishers my entire life and I keep on seeing the same, same, same mistakes over, and over and over."and echoing the frustration and, at times, outright anger of other developers at those awards.
I'm interested in how that feeds into the approach to making games themselves. In your talk, you talked about your"KPI" being"fun". I very much enjoy hearing someone say that, but also wondered how possible it was for most studios. I look at Cyberpunk 2077 developer CDPR as a really good example, where they're still technically independent, but they're also a public company.
And he told me:"Well, it's actually going better than I expected." I said,"Well, that's funny…" He says,"Well, no, it's also a waste." And so I asked him,"What do you mean?" And he said,"Well I mean, the cycle is just repeating - they fired them all. So now they're all looking for co-developers.
Is there an inherent aspect of video game development that requires you to have to lay people off at some point? Say if you have to staff up for the final push or a specific part of the process - how do you navigate that, or does it not have to be that way?It happens, for sure. When things are starting to run late, what can you do - you can outsource? But that's hard, because you have to onboard the outsourcers.
Another thing that came up, in a conversation with another developer here, was this idea about the engine being secretly a major factor in a game like Baldur's Gate 3's success, because it was the same one you'd been using before - the idea being that it makes your life a lot easier and gives you more freedom to do what you want.
One of the things you've talked about a few times was this notion of listening to players. And I'm really curious about this, partly because I look after reviews and so the topic comes up a lot in terms of, I suppose,"artistic intention".