The developer of one of my favorite 2020s RPGs does it because of BioWare: ‘Baldur’s Gate 1 is the first game I truly loved’

As part of our ongoing coverage and commemoration of the closure of BioWare, we’ve been reaching out to RPG developers to hear what the studio meant to them. Lead SEO editor Lauren Morton got in touch with 16 devs who owe their careers to the legendary RPG studio, and today I can share the words of another, Skald: Against the Black Priory lead developer Anders Lauridsen.

I had a similar experience with BioWare RPGs as a substitute for tabletop growing up, lacking friends who were interested in the hobby until well into adulthood, and I’ll wager that’s not an uncommon experience.

Hearing Lauridsen say there’s a lot of BioWare DNA in Skald made me smile. The game’s art recalls those clunkier RPGs the developer initially bounced off, but its mechanics and combat are Baldur’s Gate and Fallout to the core. I also gotta say I feel less bad about my own lack of facility with earlier generations of CRPG after hearing that a developer like Lauridsen struggled with them at first.

His enthusiasm is a heartening reminder that BioWare’s legacy is more durable than EA’s quarterly profits or private equity predation: The things we love about those games have dispersed into RPGs all over the world, and Skald is a perfect example of that.

It has the tight, low-level focus of the original Baldur’s Gate, but with a shocking inflection of cosmic horror, plus Larianesque reactive systems I never would have expected from a pixel art game⁠—Larian’s own Swen Vincke is a fan of Skald himself. It’s $15 on Steam and GOG (half-off at the latter at the time of writing), and I reviewed it on Steam Deck, where it runs like a dream.