Summary
Baldur’s Gate 3was hit by some major setbacks during development. Like every other studio,Larianhad to adjust to the restrictions put in place in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it also wanted to ensure the safety of its employees amidstRussia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“I had already thought about what we were going to do if it actually happened,” Vincke told Edge magazine, discussing the St Petersburg team (as reported byEurogamer). “So the decision was instant: we can’t stay there. We needed to move people away because, as these things go, you may almost predict that eventually there’s going to be a mobilisation, and that meant that all my team was going to go to war.”
All my team was going to go to war.
Larian Studios formed a task force of legal and finance teams that “worked day and night” to relocate employees in a way that worked for each of them individually. But this meant that they were “fighting with embassies and consultants” in what Vincke describes as a “really complicated” situation. Thankfully, in the end, they moved a staggering 90 percent of staff out of Russia.
Dedicating time and effort to moving nearly an entire team out of the country and into other studios had an impact on development, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic which was hitting studios small and large across the globe.
“In a machine as complicated as an RPG, where everything’s connected to everything, if you suddenly start ripping stuff out, the entire thing collapses,” Vincke said. “Because things that were supposed to be done are not being done. It’s not that they didn’t try, but it was really, really hard. You could see the ripple effect of that lasting all through the end of development.”
Regardless,Baldur’s Gate 3 won myriad awardsand was heralded as one of the best RPGs of all time, all while taking the time and effort to keep its employees safe.
Baldur’s Gate 3
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Baldur’s Gate 3 is the long-awaited next chapter in the Dungeons & Dragons-based series of RPGs. Developed by Divinity creator Larian Studios, it puts you in the middle of a mind flayer invasion of Faerûn, over a century after the events of its predecessor.
