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A Baldur’s Gate 3 lead has recalled how they went from “joy to anxiety in a couple of seconds” after learning they’d be working on the huge RPG series.
PLAY Magazine recently spoke to Farhang Namdar, world building director on Baldur’s Gate 3, about their earliest memories of working on the series for the first time at Larian. It turns out they experienced a huge emotional rollercoaster when Baldur’s Gate 3 director and Larian studio head Swen Vincke first told them of the project.
“I remember the day Swen told me that our next project was Baldur’s Gate 3. I literally went from joy to anxiety in a couple of seconds,” Namdar recalled. “We had joked about this frequently back in the days, so in many ways it was a dream come true. It was an honour and a lot of pressure to develop the next instalment of this ground-breaking franchise.”
“We just knew we had to make something unique to fulfil our commitment to the fans, [though] it wasn’t easy following up on what is widely regarded as one of the best RPGs of all time,” the world building director concluded.
The game that’s “widely regarded as one of the best RPGs of all time” that Namdar is referring to there is likely Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, the 2000 game developed by BioWare. The game received critical acclaim at launch and remains beloved to this day – there was even a remaster of Baldur’s Gate 2 released well over a decade after the original launch in 2013.
Following that is no small feat, let alone establishing your own foothold in another developer’s widely-beloved series. We’d say it worked out pretty well for Namdar and Larian in the end, though – Baldur’s Gate 3 is the first game to win the prestigious Game of the Year award at the five major ceremonies, and it’s sold over 10 million copies the world over.
Even Todd Howard knows how good Baldur’s Gate 3 is, but he also knows Larian didn’t spring up out of nowhere to develop the RPG without success beforehand.