Baldur’s Gate 3 Creators Wanted to Make a New Fallout Larian CEO Reveals
A new Fallout cRPG was among Larian’s possible options if the deal with Wizards of the Coast to develop Baldur’s Gate 3 didn’t materialize.
Swen Vincke, head of Larian Studios , recently revealed what was a sort of dream for the team, in case the deal with Wizards of the Coast to obtain the license and develop Baldur’s Gate 3 had not materialized : creating a new cRPG based on Fallout .
The question is very hypothetical, also because then things went in a very different way and the agreement went well, leading to the great results that we all saw with Baldur’s Gate 3 , but it is interesting to see Larian’s point of view and what could have been cooking up until a few years ago within the team.
The issue is brought up in a recent interview with Vincke published by Edge magazine, in which the Larian CEO explains various behind-the-scenes details that led to the development of last year’s celebrated RPG.
Baldur’s Gate, Fallout or Ultima
Finding a recognizable brand like Dungeons and Dragons was important for Larian, who had already achieved notable success with Divinity: Original Sin but was waiting to make the big leap with the use of a high-profile franchise .
Baldur’s Gate 3 Creators Wanted to Make a New Fallout Larian CEO Reveals
The initial idea was to propose a project for Baldur’s Gate 3 to Wizards of the Coast, but there was some uncertainty about the outcome of the proposal.
While they were waiting to see how it would go, Larian had been working on other possible ideas in case they didn’t reach an agreement on the use of the Baldur’s Gate brand, aiming for some rather high-sounding names.
Basically, the other two ideas were Fallout and Ultima: “ It could be Ultima, it could be Fallout , or it could be Baldur’s Gate,” those were the three possible paths Larian seemed to see ahead of them to utilize a major franchise.
For Larian, there weren’t many other choices when it came to a major franchise for the creation of a new RPG. The first choice was Baldur’s Gate, more in the team’s vein and probably also much more viable than the others, but it seems that the first proposal to Wizards of the Coast wasn’t particularly convincing, also because the team was busy on Divinity: Original Sin 2 . Only after a rework was the agreement reached.
The other possibilities are very fascinating but also very difficult, in fact: Ultima is a brand practically buried among the intellectual properties of Electronic Arts, and it is difficult to imagine that it could come back on the scene without the support of Richard Garriott, the author of the series.
Fallout was a possibility, but it’s equally hard to imagine that Bethesda would leave its precious IP to Larian: however, Obsidian’s precedent of Fallout: New Vegas could have represented a concrete possibility of collaboration.
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