During an event in Poland, Swen Vincke admitted that during the development of Baldur’s Gate 3 Larian Studios had to resort to a bit of crunch.
Swen Vincke, CEO of Larian Studios , admitted during an event in Poland that the development of Baldur’s Gate 3 required some crunch in order to remedy situations that the team hadn’t foreseen.
“We didn’t overuse the overtime, but it was necessary to do some crunch,” Vincke said. “To be honest, I think this is an inevitable situation when you’re trying to complete a project, especially if it has a lot of complexity.”
The CEO, however, wanted to underline that all overtime was regularly paid and that only in “very, very, very rare” cases did the studio members have to work on weekends or after eight in the evening.
The result of these efforts , as we know, has meant that their latest RPG is considered the best game ever, according to the average score on Opencritic.
A complicated question
Crunch is a phenomenon that has always been quite widespread in the field of video game development, and only in recent years have studios recognized the problem, making efforts where possible to severely limit it , even at the cost of postponing their projects.
As Swen Vincke admitted, however, there are situations in which working harder is necessary , especially to deal with unexpected events, and it is important that in this case Larian Studios did not refuse to adequately compensate its employees.
To stay on topic, Naughty Dog recently admitted to having resorted to crunch, promising to improve in the future , and the same happened to Diablo 4 to avoid postponement .