Larian Studios Had Two Backup RPG Franchises to Angle For if Dungeons & Dragons Game Didn’t Happen

If you don’t know by now that Larian Studios absolutely knocked it out of the park with their 2023 release Baldur’s Gate 3, it’s fairly safe to assume that you’ve been living under a rock. Even if the Dungeons & Dragons based role-playing game didn’t appeal to you for some reason or another (probably the turn-based combat), if you spend any time in gaming communities online you’ve seen or heard about the game that earned multiple Game of the Year awards during the year’s awards season, and its characters have definitely been on your timeline likely more than once. Afterall, have you truly lived if you haven’t asked Shadowheart how you’re holding up in her estimations?

Larian Studios crafted beautiful settings, narratives, and characters for Baldur’s Gate 3, providing immersive and rich locations to explore and characters so popular they’re already considered some of the most popular video game characters of all time. Larian Studios and Dungeons & Dragons made a beautiful combination, so it came as a surprise when the developers confirmed they’d be moving away from the IP as a whole and would not be the studio to create Baldur’s Gate 4. As it turns out though, Baldur’s Gate 3 was only one of the RPGs Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke was interested in working on, as he recently revealed in an interview with Edge 400. “It would have been Ultima, it would have been Fallout, it would have been Baldur’s Gate. There was not a lot to choose from,” Vincke revealed, name dropping two large franchises. 

While Larian obviously ended up with the license to craft Baldur’s Gate 3 and flourished in the realm of Faerûn with an RPG that will continue to be celebrated for years to come for its contribution to the industry, it’s interesting to see what types of projects Larian has been interested on working on in the past, especially when taking into consideration that Larian currently has two new projects in-development. Of course, we know Bethesda is making Fallout 5 while continuing updates on their live-service game Fallout 76, given that Larian likes to work on projects that excite them it’s nice to be able to confirm some of the genres and games that have piqued some interest in the past while pondering what their next games will shape up to be. 

Personally, I’m definitely hoping for a science fiction angle from Larian in the future, but for now I’m going to take some time to consider what a Larian Fallout game could’ve looked like.