Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke revealed that developers had to do a "little crunch" to complete their beloved RPG Baldur's Gate3, but the amount was as reported by Studio

GamesRadar, as Vincke did in a Q&A after speaking at the Digital Dragons conference in Poland last week. I was asked about crunch during the session. "We didn't over-crunch," Vincke said in his response. To be honest, I think you always have little by little when you're trying to get something done, especially when there's so much complexity.

It took overtime to get Baldur's gate3 out the door, but Vincke stressed that the degree of crunch was "certainly less in BG3 than in the past." He pointed to the various initiatives the company has made to minimize the amount of crunch that comes with making games, such as placing multiple studios around the world, which has allowed the project to be covered 24 hours a day, helping to reduce the need to deal with unexpected problems outside of working hours.

Nevertheless, Vincke admitted that "it would be a lie to say we didn't [crunch]" and that some sustained overtime was needed to complete the project. However, he stressed that the office was rarely occupied beyond 8 p.m. at night, and that employees worked "very, very, very rarely" on weekends.

Questions about crunch were asked in response to Vincke dissecting the challenges he faced when putting together many of the many RPG threads in Baldur's Gate3. In his talk on the subject, Vincke explains how the complexity of the game at some point caused concern that it was "impossible to end it", but Larian refused to compromise on either the scope or details of the RPG. Instead, the studio was reorganized to give individual teams more say in quality control of that part of the game. We're going to do this because the game needs these things," Vincke explained. "We need to create breathing space to reach the quality level that requires the game."

The lessons Larian has learned from making Baldur's Gate3 seem to apply to two new projects it has started working on. Last week, the company announced that it would open its 2nd studio in Warsaw to support these 7 new games. "The planning of the Polish studio is very simple," Vincke said in a press release. "Build a team that can work on our 2 very ambitious new RPGs and enjoy the fruits of their labor."