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No More Baldur's Gate From Larion: Team Is 'Elated'
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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9301086" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>Small is relative, sure, but the opportunity cost can be very significant, as can the morale hit. You still seem to see DLC as "free money" that Larian are leaving on the table which whilst not a generally unreasonable position, is not, I would suggest, a complete understanding of this particular situation.</p><p></p><p>Two key factors here which differentiate the BG3 situation from that a lot of games DLC/expansion-wise:</p><p></p><p>1) Larian didn't plan to do DLC/an expansion. This is the most important factor. Normally when a game which will have DLC or an expansion releases, that is planned before launch, and often even worked on before launch. You keep key team members in certain roles, move others around, and generally plan around certain staff working on that DLC/expansion for months or even years. This isn't just economic, but also important for careers - often senior staff don't want to do this, but more junior staff may get an opportunity to demonstrate their skills (we saw this with several BioWare DLCs for ME and DA dor example). Or sometimes almost the entire company remains committed, as was the case with CDPR and The Witcher 3 - a game famed for the high quality of its DLC (better than the already impressive main game). Because Larian didn't plan for this, but instead had staff going off to work on other projects, when they changed their mind - as Swen explained they did - when they started work on DLC for BG3 (again, which Swen explained they did), they would have had to change people's plans, probably pulling them off things they had planned and prepared to work on. This causes problems both morale-wise and economics-wise, because unplanned DLC takes significantly longer to produce and is significantly more disruptive to the business.</p><p></p><p>2) BG3 is an 3D AAA CRPG with full cinematics. This makes DLC particularly "heavy" to produce in terms of the footprint of employees used. If we compare it to, for example, Total War Warhammer 3, a game with several DLCs, TWWH3 has been able to employ a vastly smaller team than the one which developed it, because it only has simple 2D animatics (and used sparsely), reuses the vast majority of its assets (which are also far less detailed than BG3 assets), doesn't require writing or mocap or voice work in significant amounts (some in some cases, but truly tiny amounts), and so on. BG3 seems like it would have struggled to achieve the same - especially as other 3D AAA RPGs with full cinematics have - as noted CDPR kept most of their team on TW3 DLC and seemingly a very large portion of their huge team on the Cyberpunk 2077 team and BioWare did have to keep a lot of people working on their games to put out their DLC.</p><p></p><p>So I don't think Larian are very likely to regret this. It is possible they might want to do a "refresh"-style Definitive Edition at some point, but I suspect only if work on their next big game goes slower than planned. One advantage to stopping now is technological - if they start a game now and finish in 4 years (as Swen hopes to), they'll be dealing with fundamentally similar technology both on PC and consoles. If they add a couple of years or more to that by putting out DLC/expansions for BG3, they may be looking at more significantly different technological landscape. That's speculation of course - we shall see.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 9301086, member: 18"] Small is relative, sure, but the opportunity cost can be very significant, as can the morale hit. You still seem to see DLC as "free money" that Larian are leaving on the table which whilst not a generally unreasonable position, is not, I would suggest, a complete understanding of this particular situation. Two key factors here which differentiate the BG3 situation from that a lot of games DLC/expansion-wise: 1) Larian didn't plan to do DLC/an expansion. This is the most important factor. Normally when a game which will have DLC or an expansion releases, that is planned before launch, and often even worked on before launch. You keep key team members in certain roles, move others around, and generally plan around certain staff working on that DLC/expansion for months or even years. This isn't just economic, but also important for careers - often senior staff don't want to do this, but more junior staff may get an opportunity to demonstrate their skills (we saw this with several BioWare DLCs for ME and DA dor example). Or sometimes almost the entire company remains committed, as was the case with CDPR and The Witcher 3 - a game famed for the high quality of its DLC (better than the already impressive main game). Because Larian didn't plan for this, but instead had staff going off to work on other projects, when they changed their mind - as Swen explained they did - when they started work on DLC for BG3 (again, which Swen explained they did), they would have had to change people's plans, probably pulling them off things they had planned and prepared to work on. This causes problems both morale-wise and economics-wise, because unplanned DLC takes significantly longer to produce and is significantly more disruptive to the business. 2) BG3 is an 3D AAA CRPG with full cinematics. This makes DLC particularly "heavy" to produce in terms of the footprint of employees used. If we compare it to, for example, Total War Warhammer 3, a game with several DLCs, TWWH3 has been able to employ a vastly smaller team than the one which developed it, because it only has simple 2D animatics (and used sparsely), reuses the vast majority of its assets (which are also far less detailed than BG3 assets), doesn't require writing or mocap or voice work in significant amounts (some in some cases, but truly tiny amounts), and so on. BG3 seems like it would have struggled to achieve the same - especially as other 3D AAA RPGs with full cinematics have - as noted CDPR kept most of their team on TW3 DLC and seemingly a very large portion of their huge team on the Cyberpunk 2077 team and BioWare did have to keep a lot of people working on their games to put out their DLC. So I don't think Larian are very likely to regret this. It is possible they might want to do a "refresh"-style Definitive Edition at some point, but I suspect only if work on their next big game goes slower than planned. One advantage to stopping now is technological - if they start a game now and finish in 4 years (as Swen hopes to), they'll be dealing with fundamentally similar technology both on PC and consoles. If they add a couple of years or more to that by putting out DLC/expansions for BG3, they may be looking at more significantly different technological landscape. That's speculation of course - we shall see. [/QUOTE]
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