Baldur’s Gate 4 may eventually happen at some point, but it won’t be from Larian Studios, according to studio founder Swen Vincke, who arrived at GDC 2024 today as part of a “Secrets of ‘Baldur’s Gate 3” panel and dropped the surprising news that his team’s next project won’t be a new Baldur’s Gate game. In fact, there won’t even be Baldur’s Gate 3 DLC, nor expansions, as Larian is planning to move away from Dungeons & Dragons entirely to do something new—which, according a follow-up interview with Vincke, will be a “very big RPG that will dwarf them all.”
The future of Larian via TikTok:
Vincke later goes on to explain that Larian did have more Baldur’s Gate in mind:
- “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.”
- “There are a lot of constraints on making D&D, and 5th Edition is not an easy system to put into a video game. We had all these ideas of new combat we wanted to try out and they were not compatible.”
Vincke also confirmed that Larian’s new game isn’t Original Sin 3, although he did tease a return to Divinity last year:
- “It’s [Divinity: Original Sin] our own universe we built, so we’re definitely gonna get back there at some point. We will get back there at some point.”
- “We’ll first finish this one [Baldur’s Gate 3] now, and then take a break, because we will need to refresh ourselves creatively also.”
- “You’re seeing 400 developers putting their heart and souls into this. You’re getting the best of them and their craft into this game. And so I can tell you, it’s quite a thing.”
GDC’s bio for Vincke:
Swen is the founder of Larian studios and game director on Baldur’s Gate 3. He’s been making games since 1997 and is best known for his work as programmer, designer and director on the Divinity series which includes Divinity:Original Sin 1 & 2.