After more than a decade leading the Dragon Age series at BioWare and a brief stint at Ubisoft, Mike Laidlaw co-founded Yellow Brick Games in 2020 and has been quietly working on his first project for four years. Yellow Brick finally announced "Eternal Strand" yesterday, but in an interview at the Game Developers Conference just two weeks ago, Laidlaw said that nothing is overblown, not out of a lack of confidence in the studio's first game, but out of anticipation for what they will produce next. He said he did not want to.

At the time, Laidlaw would not divulge any details about Eternal Strands, other than the fact that it is not an RPG, as one might imagine from his long career at BioWare. He said, "With Yellow Brick, my personal goal wasn't to redefine RPGs or anything like that. What we know now is that it's a third-person action game that combines climbable monsters like in Wanda and the Colossus and physical manipulation magic like in Tears of the Kingdom.

"I don't want to exaggerate anything. I just want to say this: because I made it, and because it's a group of people who made it with me."

Rather than directly describing the Eternal Strand, Laidlaw was more open about his post-BioWare leadership goals. He learned to better communicate his vision, empowering his team and giving them the space and confidence to challenge the way they make games. He spoke a lot about the power of trust and how a team that cultivated trust in each other and came together multiplied their success.

"'BG3' was a great example of 'Divinity:' and the realization that most studios don't find the magic right away. It is true that Larian Studios did not find the magic right away; even though it became known for the success of the Original Sin series and Baldur's Gate 3, the studio nearly died with Divinity: Original Sin. It may not be that encounter with death that Laidlaw is eager to recreate, but it is the consistency of the team and its vision.

"I'm very excited myself to see a team that has managed to pull together and really dig in and elevate what they had already started working on," he said. [He speaks highly not only of Larian, but also of teams like Supergiant Games ("Bastion," "Hades").

"The biggest thing for me is that at the end of the day, all the people working on it want to keep working together. Because what that means is that we are in a position to say: cool, now that we really know each other, what have we learned?

Of course, it is a creative director's prerogative to be charmingly humble while the marketing team sitting nearby takes on the job of generating hype. Whether or not Laidlaw is personally screaming for the hills, we will be hearing a lot more about "Eternal Strands" in the run-up to its 2025 release.