Former GTA dev congratulates "bold" Larian Studios for stepping away from Baldur's Gate 3

Why take a risk? With development cycles and budgets ballooning in recent years, a flop of a game could spell doom for a studio. If you're the size of Bethesda or CD Projekt Red, you can spend years rebuilding trust with a series of updates to Starfield and Cyberpunk 2077, but for smaller studios commercial failure could be a death sentence. That's why former Grand Theft Auto developer Obbe Vermeij has gone on the record to congratulate Larian on its "bold" decision to step away from the Dungeons and Dragons license and Baldur's Gate series.

Having worked on numerous Grand Theft Auto games during his time at developer Rockstar, the former technical director knows all about risk-averse game development. While the studio has put out some of the best sandbox games of all time, it also plays it fairly safe, sticking to tried-and-tested franchises rather than creating something completely new.

As we wait even longer for the GTA 6 release date, Vermeij sat down with GamesHub to discuss all things Grand Theft Auto (including the canceled GTA Tokyo) and the wider game industry. He made sure to shout out Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian for doing the difficult thing and ceasing its involvement with DnD, despite the success it has brought it.

"It's quite cool to see Larian Studios, who just did Baldur's Gate 3 and they've said 'we don't feel like Baldur's Gate 4. We're just gonna do another game'," he says in the interview. "Good for them. But it's a bold move. It's not obvious. It's very risky. It's easier to just keep on doing what you're doing."

Vermeij's experience with risk-averse development is closer to home than for most devs. He says that he worked on a zombie game set on a remote Scottish island using the GTA engine and a spy game called Agent with another Scottish connection-this time the protagonist hailing from the land of thistle and loch-during his time at Rockstar. Both were shelved.

"The reality is if you have a studio that has one mega successful game, it just doesn't make sense to do any wild changes," he says. "Whatever weird ideas you have, we really should put them into GTA rather than just launching an entirely new game."

Larian may be leaving Baldur's Gate behind, but it's returning to its own beloved series, Divinity. The most recent game in the fantasy series, Divinity: Original Sin 2, has spiked in players since the announcement of what looks like a reboot. The RPG averaged 3,365 players in November, compared to 8,603 since the announcement at The Game Awards, according to SteamDB.

While leaving Baldur's Gate behind may be considered a bit of a risk, Larian has decades of RPG experience to inspire confidence moving forward and an established IP to fall back on in Divinity. The equivalent would be Rockstar announcing Max Payne 4 or Bully 2. That doesn't sound like a terrible idea.