- Bottom-up approach to give freedom to developers, grow larger scale games
- Malaysian studio involved in many animations and key character designs for Larian
Mohan Low is a seasoned and respected executive who has been in Malaysia’s game industry for over 20 years. Eight of those were with the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) where he rose to become director of digital creative content. He left in Sept 2024 to join Larian Studios, a game development studio headquartered in Belgium as its Studio Head for Malaysia.
The studio received acclaim from their latest game, Baldur’s Gate 3 which received the ‘Game of the Year’ award at the Game Awards 2023, an annual awards ceremony honoring achievements in the video game industry, held at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles.
“Almost all game development projects are chaotic,” Mohan said during his aptly titled session, “Embracing the chaos” at MDEC’s annual Level Up KL conference on Oct 7 that was held for the 11th year and has grown into a leading games development conference in Asia.
Quoting the founder of Larian Studios, Swen Vincke, who described it as “chaos at scale”, Mohan elaborated on what makes Larian Studios tick. “We’re a studio that gives a lot of freedom to the developers. We encourage it actually, from the bottom up, because it’s unmanageable otherwise.”
Bottom-up approach
Unlike most game development projects, where a top-down approach is adopted with a creative director leading the teams to execute on what the ideas for the game are, at Larian, “We allow teams to create those content, explore their creativity, and then the directors curate the content,” Mohan said. “This leads to a very organically grown kind of game.”
Larian’s games however, are more complex than your typical linear game, where there’s a lot of player agency involved, allowing players to choose many types of characters and have different types of options.
The world and the story are alive in a sense that it has to react to everything the player does, not just directly but indirectly as well.
“In Larian’s case, we set up a high-level framework of ideas, narrative beats, and milestones that we want to achieve, and they would be spread throughout the team in structured buckets,” Mohan explained.
“For example the creative director and the writers come up with an idea for the story, thus setting up all the pillars of the story which we then establish in two different buckets.”
In one bucket, world designers are the ones who design the different levels of the world, while in the other bucket, there would be an iterative process where the story gets implemented into the world, like game scripters who would create scenarios in the game.
“Once you have the high level beats, we empower the team to create whatever it is that they were imagining at that point in time,” Mohan said.
Production mantras
There are two production mantras that the studio follows, with one of them being “as opposed to saying No, it’s about what we can say Yes to. This line of thinking opens up possibilities.” This aligns with the bottom-up approach that Larian follows.
Even though the studio encourages exploration, the team still maintains a core vision of building the things that they love. “Build things you care about and not chase trends,” Mohan advised.
Another production mantra shows the priority that Larian has for the players. In the wrods of its founder, Sven, “We are a developer; if you give us the opportunity to increase the value or quality of our game by 5% and it’s going to cost 100% more money. Of course we are going to do that.”
While this mantra may raise a few eyebrows, and accelerate heart rates, from investors, however, it isn’t all idealism, as Sven puts, “We are in a luxury position now that we can pick our own destiny and path. I have two main goals for the studio: being able to make things that we like to make and making sure it’s sustainable so we can continue doing so.”
“Happy developers lead to a good or great product that in turn leads to happy players,” Mohan pointed out.
Iteration is in Larian’s DNA
An example is that during the development of a game, as the team goes along through the process, content continuously shifts and gets reiterated.
“You have to keep making downstream changes every time you make a change. If a scene doesn’t feel great, or the perception of the game isn’t great, we will go back and we will change it,” Mohan said. “Studios and teams need to get used to the idea that iteration is part of the process.”
Another example is the studio’s reputation to overdeliver based on feedback. “If you want two or three classes right now, guess what? we’re prepared to give you eight classes,” Mohan said.
Malaysia’s contribution to Baldur’s Gate 3
The Malaysian branch was not in the background doing just Quality Assessment, as there were many important milestones that have been achieved; some of the concept art and cover art was done in the country.
Key character designs like Elminster, and even Astarian’s suits were designed in Malaysia.
Furthermore, many animations were done in Kuala Lumpur as well, especially the spell casting which took inspiration from Malaysian sign language
