After Baldur’s Gate 3’s enormous success, Baldur’s Gate 4 feels like an inevitability. That’s how the entertainment industry normally works: if a product everyone loves makes hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s guaranteed a sequel. But I’m not sure that established thinking works when it comes to Baldur’s Gate 4.
First off, Larian itself moved on from Dungeons & Dragons to make Divinity. In an interview with IGN at GDC 2024, CEO Swen Vincke revealed Larian began work on Baldur’s Gate 3 DLC and even gave some thought to a potential Baldur’s Gate 4 before pivoting away to other projects because the team was “going through the motions.” “You could see the team was doing it because everyone felt like we had to do it, but it wasn’t really coming from the heart, and we’re very much a studio from the heart,” Vincke added. “It’s what gotten us into misery and it’s also been the reasons for our success.”
Hasbro, which owns Dungeonis & Dragons operator Wizards of the Coast, has since said it intends to make Baldur’s Gate 4. But it turns out developers are actually turning the project down, and while that sounds astonishing to hear, it makes perfect sense to me.
PC Gamer spoke with James Ohlen, co-lead designer of Baldur’s Gate 2 and former boss of Hasbro-owned Exodus developer Archetype Entertainment, and he revealed that Hasbro asked him to make Baldur’s Gate 4, but he said no. Ohlen told Hasbro boss Chris Cox, who had called him to ask about making Baldur’s Gate 4 as soon as he found out Larian wouldn’t, that he “would fail.” Why? Because he didn’t think he could compete against Baldur’s Gate 3. “That would be insanity,” he said.
There’s more nuance to this, and it goes back to the unique way the hugely ambitious Baldur’s Gate 3 was made. Larian, which had years of experience making role-playing games with its own engine via the well-received and successful Divinity: Original Sin games before starting work on Baldur’s Gate 3, put the game into Steam early access for years before its full launch in 2023. That long-running process and the invaluable feedback that came from it helped shape the game,
But on top of that, the developers at Larian are just amazing at what they do, their writers the best in the business, their quest designers the envy of the video game industry. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a masterpiece but it is also truly unique, with more content than any single player could ever hope to see. Most developers are not in the position to make a game like Baldur’s Gate 3. None, other than perhaps Rockstar, has the time, resources, or the freedom to make the sort of creative decisions that went into Baldur’s Gate 3. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a single-player role-playing game that could last you forever, and truly, there are none in the modern era quite like it.
Triple-A developers just don’t build video games this way. They are not set up to, nor are they even able to, make a game in the way Baldur’s Gate 3 was made. Especially now, with development budgets under intense pressure and publishers struggling for sales. Baldur’s Gate 4 feels to me like a game only Larian could make. And as the studio has made perfectly clear, it really isn’t interested at all.
How do you follow Baldur’s Gate 3, then? Ohlen, clearly, couldn’t see a path forward. He said he’d need to start from scratch, because Larian has walked away from Dungeons & Dragons and taken its engine with it. So, he’d need at least half a decade to build the tech, and there’s no way Larian would agree to licensing out its engine.
Then there’s Larian boss Swen Vincke to contend with. He’s the CEO of the company and the majority shareholder, but he’s also the director of Baldur’s Gate 3, which means he is free to make creative decisions — for better and for worse. Most triple-A studio CEOs do not have such freedom or control.
“Swen’s always going to be the master of building those kinds of things,” Ohlen said. “It’s really hard to take him off that throne, just because of everything — the tools, institutional knowledge, team.”
I think Baldur’s Gate 4 goes one of two ways: Hasbro tries to essentially make a bigger and better Baldur’s Gate 3, pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into a sequel that takes years to develop, launches on the next generation of consoles as well as PC, and probably isn’t as good as Baldur’s Gate 3 anyway despite all the creative freedom its developers were promised.
Or, Hasbro takes a completely different approach. It agrees that it would be insane to compete with Baldur’s Gate 3 so it doesn’t try. Instead, it tasks a developer with making something completely different, something unexpected, something unique to that studio. Something smaller scale, maybe cheaper, maybe quicker. Perhaps this would be more of a risk. Perhaps it wouldn’t.
Or maybe there’s a third option — and the more I think about this problem, the more I come around to this as a solution — we just give up on Baldur’s Gate 4 entirely. Does Baldur’s Gate 3 even need a sequel? I’m not sure it does. I’m not sure it needs a TV adaptation that continues the story, either. Perhaps Hasbro would be better off doing to Baldur’s Gate what Larian is doing to Divinity and make a soft reboot. Baldur’s Gate 4 will face extremely tough comparisons with Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m not saying a Baldur’s Gate reboot wouldn’t, but it would perhaps take the pressure off, ever so slightly.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
