‘Stories are our bread and butter’: Larian is building a special team to lay out the plot of its games years in advance

Larian Studios is gearing up to develop two new projects at once, and based on CEO Swen Vincke’s remarks in a recent GameSpot interview, it sounds like further refining the studio’s already-lauded storytelling will be at the heart of the process.

“We’re trying to make the stories of our future games now so that we have a big backlog of stories available for us when we start on the next thing,” Vincke told GameSpot’s Tamoor Hussain.

Now that Baldur’s Gate 3 has gotten its final major patch, it sounds like Larian is all systems go on its upcoming project⁠—or projects, as the studio has two irons in the fire for the first time since the early 2010s, when it was simultaneously developing the first Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Dragon Commander.

“We’re building a fairly large storytelling team to work together with our writing team,” Vincke said. As for the difference between this new team and the writers Larian has had all along? “The writers work on the games.

“Storytelling teams basically create stories in whatever form for future games and then obviously they work together with our teams on the current games also. But it’s really more of a forward-looking thing than a ‘today’ thing.”

Vincke went on to explain that game writing is much more complex than most players realize, listing all the factors that a videogame writing team has to stay on top of:

“Narrative design, dialogue writing, making sure that you have all permutations covered, arcs over longer periods of time across multiple games, these are all different disciplines and they require specialization and so you need people that are used to doing these things.”

The storytelling team sounds like it will specialize in the first step of this process, the “blue sky” phase when developers are coming up with the more general ideas of the story their game will tell. Once that’s fleshed out, writers take on the finer details like the lines of dialogue you hear from NPCs or making sure that character arcs are consistent.

Vincke pointed out that writers and storytellers also need to be thinking about the player experience, commenting, “We are a company that iterates a lot and needs a lot of story because when you play our games and you decide to do something, you want your story to continue. So, somebody needs to have thought of this.”

One thing that really stood out to me as well: Vincke went into how different writing backgrounds can be better suited for various aspects of videogame storytelling, including how screenwriters for multi-season TV shows or movie trilogies would be well-prepared for handling choice and reactivity across multiple games. It certainly sounds like Mass Effect-style multi-game choices is something Larian is at least considering.

While we haven’t heard much yet about Larian’s next game, we know it will not be Baldur’s Gate 4, but instead a new RPG codenamed “Excalibur.” Regardless of what “Excalibur” ends up being, this news of a dedicated storytelling team is a really interesting development.

After Divinity: Original Sin 1 was criticized for its more whimsical, less character-driven story, Larian seriously boned up on that front for Original Sin 2. After blowing our expectations out of the water with writing and characters in Baldur’s Gate 3, the studio clearly wants to keep up that trajectory rather than resting on its laurels.