Larain Studios boss Swen Vincke says his next game is something that he’s been planning for a while and is not necessarily a fantasy title.
Starfield launches for everyone (instead of just early access) tomorrow but so too does the PlayStation 5 version of PC hit Baldur’s Gate 3, with an Xbox version also due before Christmas.
Since it’s been out for a while on PC there’s already a bunch of patches and director Swen Vincke claims that he is now ‘done’ with the game, even as his team continue to work on new updates and, potentially, DLC.
Instead, in his final interview of the current press cycle, he’s said that he’s ready to ‘move on to the next game’ and has spoken about his love for both fantasy and sci-fi…
Although it’s open to interpretation, and you can listen to it all in the video below, questions about what Vincke was inspired by when he was young seem to imply that his next game is, like Baldur’s Gate 3, based on an existing property.
‘I’ve always had an interest in both sci-fi and fantasy, and then there’s a bunch of other things, but when it comes to entertainment, those were always my two go-to things,’ he said.
According to Vincke, whatever the new game is he’s had the idea in mind ‘for some time now’, although he wouldn’t elaborate further.
This reminds us of a conversation we had with Vincke following the first announcement of Baldur’s Gate 3, in which we talked about the possibility of him working on a sci-fi game. During the conversation we half-jokingly suggested making a Star Wars game, which he didn’t directly respond to.
However, he did say the following: ‘We’re not going to stick to fantasy forever. With BG3 it was too good of an opportunity not to take, so we really wanted to do this one. I think that if we wouldn’t have done BG3 I think we would have made something other than fantasy.’
That suggests that he’s had a non-fantasy game in mind for some time – presumably the same one he references in the new interview – and may even have got some way into the design stage, before starting Baldur’s Gate 3.
The only other thing Vincke has said about the studio’s next game is that he wants to work on something smaller scale first, rather than immediately starting work on a new epic.
Whether that means the smaller game would be sci-fi and then it’s back to more high fantasy is impossible to tell at the moment, but Vincke has said that Larian is becoming big enough to work on multiple titles at once – so maybe he can do both.
Finishing up, taking a break and moving towards new things, I suspect this is the last interview for a while and Iâm happy it was with Todd. https://t.co/JvRtsd5dqk
— Swen Vincke @where? (@LarAtLarian) September 4, 2023