拉里安（Larian）能否避免在鲍德尔（Baldur）的大门3之后的RPG成功诅咒？

When I think of great RPG studios like Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian Studios , I think of ticking time bombs. Though Baldur's Gate 3's success has been explosive, that kind of massive critical and commercial hit has often marked the beginning of an era of decline for studios that achieve it. We notice the heat and light that accompanies the bang, but the developer ends up sifting through the rubble.

Fallout 4, Fallout 76, And Starfield Chart Bethesda's Decline

Take Bethesda , for example. In 2011, the studio made Skyrim , one of the most acclaimed and best-selling RPGs of all time. It was coming off a decade of crescendoing success, with the niche but beloved The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind , giving way to crossover hits Oblivion and Fallout 3 , which primed players for the world-conquering RPG Skyrim. But the decade (and change) that followed Skyrim has been the fall after the previous decade's rise.

Michael Scott no god please no meme, but Steve Carell has Gale's hair and his image is in front of a news article about Larian not making Baldur's Gate 4

There Shouldn’t Be A Baldur’s Gate 4 If Larian Isn’t Making It

Swen Vincke announced that Larian isn't making another Baldur's Gate game at GDC.

Fallout 4 was a hit, but ended up being less beloved by fans than its predecessor. Fallout 76 was an unmitigated disaster at launch, hampered by bugs and marketing blunders. And even if it had worked perfectly out of the box, many fans would still have rejected Bethesda's initial vision of an NPC-less RPG world. Similarly, Starfield wasn't especially buggy by Bethesda standards, but players have increasingly turned on its segmented take on the open-world, which effectively breaks its sprawling galaxy down into dozens of little starry cul-de-sacs. I don't know what the future of Bethesda holds, but if The Elder Scrolls 6 doesn't live up to the lofty expectations that will have been building for nearly two decades by the time it launches, it's tough to see the developer reclaiming its spot as one of the top RPG studios in the world.

CD Projekt Red And BioWare Struggle With Cyberpunk And Anthem

CD Projekt Red had a similar path to success, though the Polish studio's mainstream breakthrough came all at once with The Witcher 3 . The Witcher and The Witcher 2 were both fairly niche, but The Witcher 3 made CD Projekt Red a household name. That, plus a sexy, futuristic setting, made Cyberpunk 2077 one of the most anticipated games I can recall in all my years of gaming. When the game launched in a broken state on last-gen consoles (and plenty buggy on PC and this-gen consoles, too) it brought those hyped-up hopes crashing to the ground. It took CD Projekt Red three years to earn back a fraction of the trust it earned coming off The Witcher 3.

Then there's BioWare . Though CD Projekt Red and Bethesda each had one success that launched them into the stratosphere, BioWare had many that established it as the developer of party-based RPGs. Many of its games — like Baldur's Gate 2 , Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic , and Mass Effect 2 — are considered some of the best RPGs of all time, and many more have a place in the RPG canon. But a pair of failures have found the studio hemorrhaging talent and goodwill over the past few years. With Mass Effect: Andromeda , BioWare failed to live up to its past single-player successes. And with Anthem , it failed to chart a new path in the live-service space. It's been five years since Anthem's launch, and fans are still waiting to see if the next Dragon Age or Mass Effect can right the ship.

These RPG developers that we once thought bulletproof have proven themselves to be surprisingly vulnerable. Bethesda is struggling to break out of the box it made for itself. CD Projekt Red overpromised and underdelivered. And BioWare has lost so much talent that it's easy to wonder if it's a Ship of Theseus at this point, bearing the same name but few of the same parts.

Baldur's Gate 3's Early Access Armor

I suspect that Larian will be able to avoid the fate that has befallen other studios, for one key reason. Cyberpunk 2077 and Starfield were hotly anticipated, but fans turned on both games when they got their hands on them and saw the extent to which their developers weren't delivering on what players wanted from open-world cyberpunk and spacefaring RPGs. Larian hasn't had that problem because its games are known quantities long before they reach 1.0 thanks to the company's embrace of early access.

Hundreds of hours of content were added to Baldur's Gate 3 when the full game finally launched, it's true. But fans knew what they could expect from the game on a systems level. They knew how it played, even if they didn't know what Acts 2 and 3 held. Their expectations couldn't be wildly off base because the game was being made in front of their eyes, with years of player feedback being taken into account. Instead of Night City Wire-style previews that hyped the game up endlessly, Larian could offer something better: the game itself.

No matter where Larian goes next, the studio, like CEO Swen Vincke, wears a suit of armor. If it sticks with early access for its next project — as it has with Divinity: Original Sin, D:OS2, and Baldur's Gate 3 — it can't launch a game wildly out of step with player expectations. Game developers have often hyped players up by showing tiny glimpses of their games, allowing players to imagine something far greater than the final product could ever live up to. Larian does the opposite. It gives players a huge chunk of the game and, defying secrecy, builds something better in the open.