D&D General No More Baldur's Gate From Larion: Team Is 'Elated'

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​

​

 

[Zardnaar]

Think I did ACT2 in around 15 hours wife's recent playthrough it was 12.

She did rush Act 3 skipping Jaheira related stuff but you can generally knock out Ansur, Viconia, Cazador, Orin, Sarevok in an hour or less.

 

[R_Chance]

It's pretty routine for videogame developers to want to do something different after working on a project for eight years, but Larian's very public frustration over Hasbro dumping all the people they had relationships with at WotC is hard to ignore in this situation.

If Larian wanted to do more BG3 conteent or a BG4 they would have made new contacts not moved on. They wanted a fresh start. As for WotC, I doubt they are averse to making money and a BG3 expansion or a sequel would have been coining money for WotC and Larian.

Well, color me silly. Firing off a reply to a post from the first page of a 20+ page thread

 

[Ruin Explorer]

As for WotC, I doubt they are averse to making money and a BG3 expansion or a sequel would have been coining money for WotC and Larian.

I think it's a little more complex than this.

Opportunity cost is a real thing, and as I pointed out (I know you were replying to page 1 so won't have seen that), DLCs/expansions sell a small fraction of the number of copies the main game does. The main purpose of DLCs/expansions is less to sell (except for a few games which do them for very extended periods, like the Total War series, or Paradox games), and more to maintain interest in the main game, and keep people buying that. Then you have a GotY or similar package later which packs in the expansions and you can sell that for more than you normally would sell the game for at that point and people feel okay about it. Larian has seen from previous games that they probably don't really need to do this, because they don't have a lot of close competition and can just rely on their game having a "long tail" - most RPGs do - i.e. they sell for many years after initial release, which is far less true of action games.

And by working on a DLC for a small return for them, they're taking staff and focus away from other projects. Now, sometimes that can make sense - if the DLC only needs staff not yet needed on a longer-term project (for example writers and quest-scripters might not be needed heavily in the early phase of a game's production, but might be the main people you need for a DLC) - but often that's not really the case, and you're taking staff away from other projects. It can also have morale impacts, though that's variable - some people are keen to work on DLC, others less so.

A DLC would have been free, zero-effort money for Hasbro/WotC, but for Larian it would have been a significant opportunity cost.

If Larian are making another full-scale CRPG, as one might guess is the case, given Swen already compared their next project to BG3 (specifically by saying it will "dwarf BG3" - not a comparison you'd likely make about a game in a different genre), and given Swen has also stated specifically that he wants the next game out in 4 years, not 6 (good luck with that, mate, I say - I think this is unlikely - ironically a BG4 could probably have been done in 3-4 years as the engine already exists), it's probably an "all hands on deck" situation as they're prototyping hard.

 

[JediSoth]

DLC quality can range from "Blood & Wine" (The Witcher 3) to "Dead Money" (Fallout: New Vegas). At least we know we won't be getting another "Dead Money."

I'm confident they'll make a better game if their hearts are actually in it. I think it's perfectly fine for a game to be called "Finished."

 

[DarkCrisis]

I’m curious to see if WotC will outsource DLC.

Probably not, but maybe!

 

[Reynard]

I’m curious to see if WotC will outsource DLC.

Probably not, but maybe!

Do we know who owns the engine? I assume Larian does but I honestly don't have any real reason to believe that other than it feels right.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

So talking of cut content, Swen discussed some pretty wild stuff that got cut - spoiler-blocking as necessary in case anyone is still concerned.

"We asked Vincke about other major changes to companions during development, which prompted him to suggest that there was "an entire roster of companions that didn't make the cut.""

"Who was his favorite cut companion? A surprising answer: it's Act 2's major villain, Ketheric Thorm."

Indeed it kind of looks like, from the dialogue, part of the reason Aylin exists is to block this path off, because she cuts him off as he's basically saying "Yo actually I'd like to be redeemed". We know there were particularly major changes to Act 2 around the role Isobel and Aylin played, and indeed who they were.

"Vincke doesn't stop there. He shares other "darlings" that were killed - Githyanki queen Vlaakith's palace, the Gith Astral Plane, Candlekeep, (where the original Baldur's Gate started out), and even a visit to Hell itself, were all in the game at some point."

Apparently the main reason for the areas getting cut is that they wanted fewer, larger areas, rather than more, smaller areas. In retrospect I think this was probably a mistake, because on repeat playthroughs it's the smaller, more detailed areas that retain interest, but it does explain the approach. It's also a little funny because Swen specifically denied, earlier, that there was ever a section set in the last place discussed, but now is casually admitting the dataminers were right. Oh well.

From this article:

Baldur's Gate 3 Director Reveals One Surprising Villain That Used to Be Playable - IGN (spoilers, obvs)

 

[Ondath]

Visiting Candlekeep would've been honestly fun. I also want someone to recreate Baldur's Gate 1 (and 2 but even dreams have limits) using the BG3 engine, and that would've been far easier if Candlekeep was already made.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Do we know who owns the engine? I assume Larian does but I honestly don't have any real reason to believe that other than it feels right.

I suspect there's language in the contract that gives WotC a limited time license to use it in just these sorts of cases. But Hasbro would need an in-house team with a lot of experience on CRPGs to be able to spin up a DLC team for BG3, and there's no evidence they've got anything of the sort. The closest Hasbro has come to BG3 is Dark Alliance, which has been memory-holed by everyone, even just a few years later.

So they could do something like this, but they would have to be very on the ball about finding someone, say, who'd just left Bioware or Obsidian, give them a big pile of money, let them hire their own small team and give them a lot of authority very quickly. That's a big ask for any company that's not in start-up mode, and Hasbro definitely does not have a start-up mindset.

I would guess BG3 is dead. And given that WotC seems uninclined to even do a book collecting the settings, NPCs, treasure (so much treasure), spells and monsters from the game, I'd assume this is basically over, except for the next big BG3 patch, which adds more formal modding support.

If we're lucky, we will see a few of the companions from BG3 show up in 10 years in BG4. If we're really lucky, they'll show up in a novel or adventure, but I wouldn't expect that any time soon, given how ambivalent WotC has been about the game, even before all the people who worked with Larian were shown the door. (Minsc and Boo showing up in recent products is a BG1 & 2 thing, IMO.)

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

FWIW, the internal file structure of BG3 is a mess, so I don't think Larian's tools are on the level of 'here, you can license our engine/tools for a DnD project', even if they wanted to go in that direction to maintain an income flow while they work on other projects. It also has weird omissions, like magical items are not base item + magic properties stacked onto it, but instead they are all unique items (which makes random loot much more difficult to create).

I think the best we can hope for, BG-wise, is that Hasbro lets it sleep for another decade, and then someone with heart creates a BG4, and some of the characters from this can get cameos there. Though they'll likely be AI-voiced on the fly by then...