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A new article is available (based on the GDC talk):
www.ign.com
“You put it into the early access community, you go back the next day, you see plenty of things that went well, you see all your bad design decisions exposed, your good design decisions you see no one talks about them, so you’re good,” Vincke says of early access. “It allows you to rapidly try things out, you see what resonates, what doesn’t resonate, and when you have to put so many rules as we had to convert and figure out ways people would understand them or not understand them, it is a very, very useful tool to have.”
But Larian put Baldur’s Gate 3 into early access anyway. There were still some hiccups. The initial early access launch was rough and Larian has had to make extensive changes based on player feedback, though Vincke feels that ultimately made the game much better. He admits it was disheartening to see critics publish scored reviews of a game that was very much still in progress, though he acknowledges they had every right to do so — Baldur’s Gate 3 was out in the wild, being sold for money after all.
But with better perspective on what he ought to have done differently in the lead-up to early access, Vincke affirms he wouldn’t change his decision if he had to do it all over again.
“I would certainly organize ourselves better than what we did,” he says. “There were things that I did not expect were going to happen. But the benefits are so clear…You can literally trace the paths of why things were done based back to community discussions, reactivity that you saw, analytics that you saw. That's the beautiful thing about it. And you can't do that — I wouldn't actually know how to do it without having a community. You have a team of thousands and thousands of beta testers I guess. But even then it's not going to be the same thing.”
Baldur’s Gate 3 Was So Huge, Larian Chose to Triple in Size Rather Than Shrink the Game - IGN
Baldur's Gate 3 is a dream project for Larian Studios. But as its creative director explains, the scope of implementing true player choice across such an ambitious project has resulted in more than a few development hurdles.
“You put it into the early access community, you go back the next day, you see plenty of things that went well, you see all your bad design decisions exposed, your good design decisions you see no one talks about them, so you’re good,” Vincke says of early access. “It allows you to rapidly try things out, you see what resonates, what doesn’t resonate, and when you have to put so many rules as we had to convert and figure out ways people would understand them or not understand them, it is a very, very useful tool to have.”
But Larian put Baldur’s Gate 3 into early access anyway. There were still some hiccups. The initial early access launch was rough and Larian has had to make extensive changes based on player feedback, though Vincke feels that ultimately made the game much better. He admits it was disheartening to see critics publish scored reviews of a game that was very much still in progress, though he acknowledges they had every right to do so — Baldur’s Gate 3 was out in the wild, being sold for money after all.
But with better perspective on what he ought to have done differently in the lead-up to early access, Vincke affirms he wouldn’t change his decision if he had to do it all over again.
“I would certainly organize ourselves better than what we did,” he says. “There were things that I did not expect were going to happen. But the benefits are so clear…You can literally trace the paths of why things were done based back to community discussions, reactivity that you saw, analytics that you saw. That's the beautiful thing about it. And you can't do that — I wouldn't actually know how to do it without having a community. You have a team of thousands and thousands of beta testers I guess. But even then it's not going to be the same thing.”
