[talking about Fallen Heroes]
So it's a spin-off game? Why not just go straight to Divinity: Original Sin 3?
Swen: (laughs) Yeah, it's a spin-off game. Well, we're making Baldur's Gate 3 so it's consuming all our efforts. It's not a simple game to make.
Larian is making Baldur's Gate 3 now and Baldur's Gate is such a beloved franchise. How are you going to live up with the fans' expectations?
Swen: I don't think we can live up to the expectations. I think that's impossible. Those expectations are soaring through to the roof. What we're doing is we're making our type of Dungeons & Dragons with a lot of love for what came before and with also putting our own stamp on it.
That's literally the only way we could approach it. We don't want to make a clone of Baldur's Gate 2. We want to make Baldur's Gate 3. It's based on the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons so there's a lot of stuff that I think that we're going to add into it. There are also innovations and things you haven't seen before but we'll never know which one the fans are going to like it or not. I hope the fans like it because we put a lot of effort into it.
Have you asked the previous developers BioWare and Interplay about making Baldur's Gate 3?
Swen: Well, the team who made previous Baldur's Gate games have spread around but we talked to a whole lot of them. We chatted with them about how to do it. We also talked to the people of Wizards of the Coast obviously since they're the owner of Dungeons & Dragons. So we came up with something that I think it's good. We'll see.
I'm fascinated by how you're able to translate tabletop gameplay to video games. Tabletop games are quite complex already. Will Baldur's Gate 3 has the gameplay mechanics similar to Divinity: Original Sin?
Swen: No, it's not the same as Divinity: Original Sin. It's very different at its core. For me, the biggest difference is probably the class-based gameplay. The similarity, however, is that both Divinity: Original Sin and Baldur's Gate 3 will try to give you a lot of player agency. You decide to do something. The Dungeon Master thinks and says, "Sure, roll D20". They just check and we'll see if it goes or not. That's the fun of it.
We're trying to do the same but in a video game, the game itself becomes the Dungeon Master. So we have to figure out upfront on what you're going to be doing, for example, in terms of stupidity and have the game world reacts to you. That's what we want to try. I think we have cool stuff in there.
