Larian Studios has seen incredible growth over the last decade or so. The Belgian developer nearly pushed itself over the bring in its efforts to develop Divinity: Original Sin, but the critical commercial success of the 2014 RPG that the studio could expand significantly as it started working on its sequel, Divinity: Original Sin 2. Now, Larian is hard at work on the highly anticipated Baldur’s Gate 3, and the studio’s growth, unsurprisingly, has continued.
In an interview with PC Gamer, Larian Studios founder and CEO Swen Vincke revealed that the studio currently has 400 people working on Baldur’s Bate 3, which far exceeds what they had initially anticipated they would need for the game’s development.
“We thought we had it all figured out,” Vincke said. “We even estimated how big we’d have to become.”
“I never expected us to be 400 people to make Baldur’s Gate 3,” he added. “Nobody expected it. But it’s literally what we needed to do it. We had a choice. There was a moment where we started understanding what we needed to do to make this game. We thought we understood. Then we actually really understood. And so we had two choices: we could scale it down, or we could scale ourselves up. And so we chose to scale ourselves up.”
Those 400 people, interestingly, are spread across seven studios across the globe. Currently Larian is nearly 10 times as large as it was in 2014 during the development of the original Divinity: Original Sin. During the peak of Divinity: Original Sin 2’s development, the studio had around 150 people working on the game.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is currently in early access on PC (via Steam) and Stadia. The game’s expected to launch in full sometime in 2023.
