Baldur's Gate 3 director bragged it could be the "RPG of the decade" during development - then immediately regretted it

Baldur's Gate 3's director has reflected on the game's early development process, and why he regretted saying it could be the RPG of the decade.

At a presentation at Digital Dragons in Poland, Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke revealed to attendees how the RPG looked in the early stages of development. Vincke revealed Larian originally wanted to have a "dungeon master" tell the player what was going on via voiceover, but Vincke felt it was a "little too ambitious" for Larian to handle.

Baldur's Gate 3's early development years also proved how "inexperienced" Larian was with making cinematics, Vincke further revealed. "But we felt really, really, really confident because we had already made two RPGs, they were hit RPGs, what could go wrong?" Vincke continued.

"I was so confident, in fact, that I'm gonna do something I would never do again," the Baldur's Gate 3 director continued. Vincke then played an old clip of himself presenting Larian's plans for Baldur's Gate 3 at an internal meeting to owner Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro, during which he claimed Baldur's Gate 3 could be the "RPG of the decade."

"Almost instantly, I regretted my words," Vincke said of the older clip. "So we got into a whole shitload of trouble. It began in the first year - so you can see nothing is moving," the director continued, playing a clip of a very early cinematic design in Baldur's Gate 3.

"The team just kept on having meeting after meeting where they wanted to perfect everything that they had done wrong in the past. The problem is, when you chase perfection, you can spend a lot of time discussing things. Ultimately, we got over this phase of discussion after more than a year, and we started producing stuff, and then we ran into a whole bunch of other problems," Vincke continued.

The "number of features" was one of the major problems Larian had to deal with early on, as was the growth of the studio itself to deal with the amount of features. Inexperience with cinematics was a major