Larian Reveals Its Baldur’s Gate 4 That Never Was

This weekend marks the one-year anniversary of Baldur’s Gate 3 and its initial launch on PC. Larian’s fantasy RPG was a big boon for Hasbro: not only was it one of 2023’s biggest games, it became a commercial hit almost instantly and racked up tons of year’s end awards. Naturally, people have been clamoring for more, and it turns out Larian was seriously thinking about giving it to them.

In a recent interview with PCGamer, Larian CEO Swen Vincke revealed the team once considered staying in stay in the Dungeons & Dragons setting after wrapping development on their blockbuste hit. Everyone was “vulnerable” to doing more and still had production fever, so they explored a potential expansion (or standalone title) where they’d just have to “add extra levels or make some new stories.” Then, they realized an expansion wouldn’t be worth the effort, and things escalated into a full-on sequel. It sounds at the very least playable, but it likely wouldn’t have come until 2027 at best.

What ultimately stopped the idea from going forward is time: making Baldur’s Gate 3 took several years, and just “doing the same thing” again didn’t sound terribly appealing. Vincke voiced these thoughts during a company meeting, and everyone agreed they should move on and not do a sequel or expansion, period. He’d later confirm the studio’s plans to the public at GDC 2024, and it sounds like it was the best call. He called the decision a godsend, and what probably helped was basically all of Larian’s partners at Wizards at the Coast who helped get the game made were laid off late last year.

It’d be easy for Larian to rest on Baldur’s Gate 3’s laurels, but Vincke wants to “look at how we can do stuff that we get excited about.” The studio’s now working on two concurrent projects (one’s codenamed “Excalibur”), and he sounded glad to be “doing our own thing again. We’re not rehashing, we’re not trying to convert rules from 50 years ago into something new. Morale is super high, you really cannot explain or express it, how liberated we are.”

Given how big a hit Baldur’s Gate 3 was, Hasbro and Wizards are likely scouting for another studio to carry the torch. It might be a while before we hear anything about it, but until then, Larian’s epic is right there with a whole lotta game and an epilogue eventually waiting for you.

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