Larian boss Swen Vincke has said that the studio did not expect the incredible launch it has seen on PC, with the Steam concurrent player count hitting over 800,000 at the time of writing.
"This was not in the books at all. This was way, way beyond what we expected," Vincke told PC Gamer. "There's also no precedent for it, for our type of game to have that many people playing concurrently...Everybody here is very happy. You see a lot of smiling faces. At the same time, a lot of focus. We have reports coming in from people having issues, so we're focused on fixing those issues, that's very much on everyone's minds."
There were worries that the game may not even surpass its early access sales, which numbered at around 2.5 million. "Other games were very successful in early access and then on the day of release they didn't sell much more because they saturated already," Vincke said. "That was my biggest fear, that that had happened. It was a thing I worried about, because it is Dungeons & Dragons and a more complex ruleset, so getting people on-boarded is not the easiest thing in the universe."
Larian can't rest easy now that the game has been released, though, as they're already looking towards the future with bug fixes and the PS5 version. But, Vincke remains confident that the studio is on the right path.
"We are on the road that we wanted to be on. It's a little bit slower than we expected, because the events of the last couple years have slowed down development for everybody, but this is what we want to do: Make these multiplayer systems-driven RPGs and bring them to you in an immersive manner, which means bringing them to you in a cinematic way."