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Larian Studios Talks About Its Future
(www.youtube.com)
- Larian is working on two games right now and restructuring the company around making both of those projects flow.
- They've got a new narrative team meant to improve the work processes of detecting issues with player reactivity in complex RPGs.
- Vincke has a lot to say about machine learning, and it's somehow both vague and nuanced. He sees it as a way to speed up development on certain tasks, particularly prototyping and detecting problems that come up from iteration and changes, without replacing the need for handcrafted content.
- For some reason, we're still talking about "single player games are dead" discourse, even though Larian made the Best Multiplayer Game of 2023 and single player games are demonstrably, all the time, not dead.
- At least #4 led to an interesting discussion about how to lead a sustainable game business, including how to manage your "S" growth curve with more innovation. Mostly, Vincke summarizes it as "happy player, happy business", which you might have surmised from his Game Awards speech.
- Then there's some pretty low-hanging fruit when it comes to interacting with a game's community that's difficult to argue with, like "embrace mods that put your characters in other games".
- Vincke says the team finds DLC boring to make, so they don't really want to make it anymore.
- As far as what Larian's actually doing next, with the interviewer Tamoor Hussain keeping it to things that Vincke will actually answer, Vincke is hoping to make a pipeline over the next 5 years where they can get multiple RPGs in development at the same time smoothly. About as close as we'll get to a timeline on their next game is that Vincke says his wife will divorce him if their next game isn't out 5 years from now.
