Bad news for Baldur's Gate fans--It seems that Larion is out of the Baldur's Gate business. CEO Swen Vicke has announced that Baldur's Gate 3 is not getting any expansions, DLC, or a sequel. Patches and fixes will still continue, however, including cross-platform mod support.
"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."
-Swen Vicke
Vicke confirmed this at a talk at the Game Developers Conference, and said that Larion Studios wanted to make its own new content rather than license IP from another company.
He also clarified that a Baldur's Gate 4 was still possible, but that if it happened it would not be made by Larion. Larion is already working on its next big release.
According to IGN, Larion has started work on some BG3 DLC, but it was cancelled.
"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. It’s what gotten us into misery and it’s also been the reasons for our success."
-Swen Vicke
According to Vicke, when the BG3 team found out that they would not be making more Baldur's Gate content, they were 'elated'.
“I thought they were going to be angry at me because I just couldn’t muster the energy. I saw so many elated faces, which I didn’t expect, and I could tell they shared the same feelings, so we were all aligned with one another. And I’ve had so many developers come to me after and say, ‘Thank god.'"
-Swen Vicke
