Available since August 2023 on PC and later on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, Baldur's Gate 3 has amazed millions of players and has achieved the feat of winning countless awards in various ceremonies. With such success, one might think that Larian Studios would simply want to ride on the popularity of the license and focus on Baldur's Gate 4, but that is not the case.
Larian Studios will not develop Baldur's Gate 4 and has canceled a Baldur's Gate 3 DLC
IGN reported that during a roundtable organized as part of the Game Developers Conference, Swen Vincke, the founder of Larian Studios, confirmed that the studio would move away from the Dungeons and Dragons license to work on something new.
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He still confirmed in an interview with IGN that the studio had started working on a DLC for Baldur's Gate 3, but it was ultimately canceled. He also revealed that development of Baldur's Gate 4 was considered, but ultimately shelved to look at something new.
Given the success, the most obvious thing would have been to do a DLC, and so we started making one. We even started thinking about Baldur's Gate 4. But we hadn't yet finished Baldur's Gate 3, and moving forward with something new didn't seem wise.
We had also spent a lot of time converting the system into a video game, and we wanted to do new things. The creation of Dungeons and Dragons is subject to many constraints, and the 5th edition is not an easy system to transpose into a video game. We had all these ideas for new fights that we wanted to try, but they didn't fit together.
Concerning the canceled DLC, he simply explained that he made this decision because the team did not want to do it. So, the announcement was made after the Christmas vacation, when the team returned.
You could see that the team was doing it because everyone felt like it needed to be done, but it wasn't really coming from the heart, and we're very much a studio that comes from the heart. This is what plunged us into misery, but it is also the reason for our success.
You know, we're not going to do it. We're going to pivot and start doing these other things that we talked about, that we planned to do before we started Baldur's Gate.
Players can thus abandon all hope of seeing a DLC or a sequel developed by Larian Studios. Another developer can now take over.
Let's pass the torch to another studio to take on this incredible legacy.
The studio's next game won't be Divinity: Original Sin III
If the studio had confirmed at the beginning of 2023 not to rule out the return of the Divinity: Original Sin license, we now know that the next Larian title will not be a sequel to the episode released in 2017.
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Swen Vincke said the next game will be “different than you think”, but will still be “familiar”. He also added that this new project will “eclipse” Baldur's Gate 3.
The creative team absolutely does not seem to be short of ideas. Swen Vincke said he wanted to make two games and already had “a lot of concepts”.
We have two games we want to make, and we have a lot of concepts. So, let's get Baldur's Gate 3 over with. Everything went well. We did our job. It's a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.
According to him, the team was delighted to learn that work on Baldur's Gate 3 was almost finished, some members even went up to him to say “Thank God”.
I'm always the one who starts with the initial idea and then gives it to the team. They start to improve it and turn it into something much better. During Baldur's Gate 3, I showed them the next game… If I see they're excited, I say, “Okay, let's do it.” » If they aren't, that's a different story. If they aren't, I go back to the drawing board. So they were very excited about some of the things we were planning to do.
We weren't opposed to Baldur's Gate 4 or the DLC, but our heart wasn't in it. It was more routine work than enthusiasm. Today, the enthusiasm has returned to the room, and that is very important.
What is certain is that we will still have to show a lot of patience before learning more about the studio's next project. At the start of the year, Swen Vincke declared that he had finished writing Act 1 of his next game, “after 4 months of rewriting and rewriting and abandoning ideas and then revisiting them”.
This should give you plenty of time to discover the incredible Baldur's Gate 3 on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and PC. The Deluxe Edition will also begin shipping in the coming weeks for console players.