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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9514414" data-attributes="member: 18">To be fair, that's kind of what Larian did, actually.As of DOS2's launch, Larian was like, 80 people or something, definitely an AA company size and budget-wise.Shortly before DOS2 was released, WotC had given Larian the contract to develop BG3 (though as far as we know, WotC never financially supported Larian), so Larian had a very clear idea of what they were doing next. DOS2 made crazy money, way more than previous Larian games, and this together with knowing what they were doing, allowed Larian to start hiring people really rapidly, and to start new locations for their company, including, importantly, one in English-speaking, Britain-adjacent, Ireland. This mattered because Swen had recognised writing was their biggest weakness, and they needed a lot of good primary English speaking writers.Whilst they continued to hire people and work on pre-production for BG3, they got the new writers to re-write and re-voice all of DOS2 (as well as improving the areas it was weak in), which acted as good practice for them.They launched BG3 into Early Access once they could, to keep money flowing in, and later allowed Tencent (the Chinese media giant) to take a 30% stake in Larian, for an undisclosed but probably significant sum. All this together kept them going for six years until the game released (already having sold 2.5m copies in EA, IIRC!).But they went from 80 people to 400 people over that time period, which is insane growth. You might think, well the same people remained in charge, with all their experience, right? But actually no. Aside from Swen, many of the leads for BG3 were new hires, with the people who'd occupied those positions previously sitting under them in the new hierarchy. They also added a ton of new tech they'd never used before, including motion capture and heavy use of cutscenes.What they did have though was an engine - so that was one significant advantage.</blockquote>

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