Larian Studios, the developer behind the critically acclaimed Baldur’s Gate 3, is officially moving on from Dungeons & Dragons. The studio cancelled a Baldur’s Gate 3 DLC that was planned and won’t be tackling a sequel either.
The news comes from a talk given during GDC 2024, given by Baldur’s Gate 3 director Swen Vincke. It’s a pretty big announcement, but to be fair, Larian has never promised any more Baldur’s Gate 3 content outside of patches.
Speaking to IGN, Vincke says, “Because of all the success the obvious thing would have been to do a DLC, so we started on one. We started even thinking about BG4. But we hadn’t really had closure on BG3 yet and just to jump forward on something new felt wrong. We had also spent a whole bunch of time converting the system into a video game and we wanted to do new things.”
However, after the overwhelming success of Baldur’s Gate 3, the team at Larian did actually start developing add-on DLC, but according to Vincke it wasn’t “coming from the heart.”
After taking a vacation over the Christmas holidays, Vincke returned to the studio and decided to tell everyone they wouldn’t be doing the DLC, and the response from the rest of the team was “elated.”
“I’m always the one where it starts with the initial idea and then I give it to the team and they start iterating it and they turn it into something much better. During BG3 I pitched to them what the next game would be…If I see they’re excited, I’ll say, ‘Okay let’s do that.’ If they’re not, it’s back to the drawing board.,” Vincke tells IGN “So they were very excited about a couple of the things we were planning on doing. Then the pivot to start doing BG3 DLC was expected because it’s what you do…We didn’t have any antagonism against BG4 or DLC, but the heart wasn’t there. It was more routine work than actually being excited. Now we have the excitement back in the room and that’s a big important thing.”
Larian’s next project will apparently be something entirely different but “still familiar,” and not another entry in the studio’s Divinity franchise, like Divinity: Original Sin 3.
As for what’s next for Baldur’s Gate, the future of the franchise lies entirely with Wizards of the Coast. After the overwhelming success of Baldur’s Gate 3, it seems unlikely that we won’t see a sequel in some form. It quickly became one of the highest-rated games of all time on Metacritic and has reportedly raked in an eye-popping $90 million for Hasbro.
There are already new D&D games in production as well, like a survival game from the makers of Payday 3 that was announced last December.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is available on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
