Larian Studios has brought back its Baldur’s Gate 3 advent calendar, promising 12 days of “wonders, music, and cheer” that kicks off with a tease—a not very informative tease, I’ll tell you up front, but a tease nonetheless—of its next game.
You’ll have to work for your first reward, but just a bit, by solving a small, simple jigsaw puzzle that reveals an image of the Shadow-Cursed Lands, and a little history about how it came to be. Your reward is a video featuring members of all the Larian studios worldwide offering their merry Christmas wishes, after which senior communications developer Aoife Wilson pulls a large wrapped gift form under the tree, bearing a notably oversized tag: “Larian’s Next Game™.”
Before she can say anything, though, Larian boss Swen Vincke charges in from the left, shoulder-blocking her off the screen. “Oh no you don’t!” he cries, not so festively. “No no no no no no no! Sorry. Sorry about that.
“Ah, no. This thing, it needs a lot more time in the oven. By the time it’s going to be finished, it’s going to be so big. For the time being, you’re going to have to wait.”
And then he literally boots it off the screen. And that’s that.
As we prepare for a long rest,One last gift we give, the very best!Twelve days of wonders, music, and cheer,Poems and treasures, all drawing near.Play now, adventurers, don’t delay,Unlock your gifts, starting today!A Very Larian Christmas, now online:… pic.twitter.com/tbdAsZjf37December 13, 2024
It’s silly and doesn’t really reveal anything (I warned you) but it’s also fun, as Vincke and company so often are when it comes to these little community bits. And it reminds me of comments Vincke made in August, about being “bad at judging the length of our games.” Baldur’s Gate 3 is genuinely a big game, but Vincke was worried it wouldn’t be big enough (the sign of a true RPG head) and so Larian made a bunch of regions and other content that ended up getting cut when they realized, hey, this is getting too big.
There are no guarantees in life, but the monstrous success of Baldur’s Gate 3 provides at least two reasons that Larian’s next RPG will be even more massive: There’s clearly an appetite for 100+-hour RPGs, and for the foreseeable future at least, financial worries should be a distant memory. If Larian wants to double down and make the biggest RPG ever, well, now it probably can. And it probably will: Vincke was very clear earlier this year that Larian wants to go big for its next RPGs: “The machine is meant to make large games.”