Greedfall 2 boss says Baldur's Gate 3's breakout success "allowed us" to do early access
"It's so interesting to be able to exchange with the players to improve the game"
Greedfall 2 is scheduled to launch in one month, and in a first for cult RPG studio Spiders, it's initially arriving in early access form. The devs have wanted to do early access for years, but it took the immense success of the early access graduate Baldur's Gate 3 to convince publisher Nacon to give it a shot.
"It was [Baldur's Gate 3] that allowed us to convince Nacon to do an early access for Greedfall 2," Spiders CEO Jehanne Rousseau told 12DOVE during a Gamescom interview. "I was asking to make an early access for our game for years, and they said 'No, RPGs never work, it won't work.' And since Baldur's Gate 3, it's like 'look it's working, let us do it.'"
Baldur's Gate 3 spent the better part of three years in early access, and the lengthy period of going back and forth with fans helped shape the game into the RPG that the world fell in love with in 2023. Developer Larian had previously used early access for the Divinity: Original Sin games going back to 2014, and given the increasing quality of the studio's work over the past decade, I think it's safe to say they're doing something right.
"It's so interesting to be able to exchange with the players to improve the game," Rousseau continued, "to make sure all the options they need to enhance their experience are inside the game. It's exactly what I wanted to have. I want to be able to work with the community. And every game we were developing, it's super frustrating, because you release a game, you get some nice feedback, but every time there is some feedback from players, [and we say] 'they're right, we should have done that.'"
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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.
- Heather WaldSenior staff writer