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]

Yeah sorry, not in this thread but I have seen people online who are of the opinion Larian gave us an unfinished game.

If you play it a lot you can kind of see where they cut content and shoehorn stuff in.

Not unfinished as such but woukd have been nice to have that stuff.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

And it should be noted that they are still working on the base game:

Larian's saying goodbye to Baldur's Gate 3 by giving us some 'really evil' endings

Even though the studio is planning to move on to new things, it's not done with BG3 yet.

www.pcgamer.com

Which ... again, for any other company, this would practically be DLC/extra content to be paid for.

That's not true Vael.

Loads of other companies give post-release support about as good as this. Just looking at RPGs, CDPR do, for example, both Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 got support considerably beyond what Larian is even planning for BG3. Pillars of Eternity 2 got a considerable amount of extra stuff added and changed, even got a turn-based mode added, as did Kingmaker, albeit with Kingmaker, aside from the TB mode, it's hard to see where "bugfixing and finishing out the game" ends!

Even little indie games like Wildermyth (which is an amazing and very underplayed and under-discussed RPG) got multiple entire extra narrative campaigns beyond those planned for release, not as DLC, together with significant changes and additions.

I get that, if the last game you played was maybe, 10 years ago, you might think the bolded bit, but in 2024? No way man. It's not even slightly true. Loads of companies give this level of support, or something very close to it, for the last few years it's been somewhat common, and you kind of look bad/odd if you don't. The only unusual thing here is that they're adding something basically nobody asked for, instead of stuff people did.

Indeed, Larian themselves seems like they're going to support BG3 far, far LESS than they did Divinty: Original Sin 2. So to some extent this is a downgrade - most people expected at the very least a "Definitive Edition" of BG3 say 2 years or so after release, like both DOS games got. That seems to have been basically ruled out. And those were huge - particularly the DOS2 one, which had them re-write THE ENTIRE SCRIPT for the game, all the dialogue and description and then make it all fully voiced - because they'd hired a bunch of new, English-as-their-first-language writers (including Smith and Ding I think). The plot stayed terrible as did the setting, but the dialogue improved a huge amount, and they massively improved Act 3 and Act 4 as well by adding and changing content - not to the point of making them "good", but actually playable. And honestly, BG3 could definitely do with Act 3 getting some changes and improvements of a very similar kind. But it isn't going to get them as far as we know. Instead we're getting some more in-depth endings that all of like 5% of players will ever see, at most. It's a pretty weird place to expend extra effort, honestly. The mod tools are better, but they're planning them to be massively cut-down compared to DOS2's mod/DMing tools - which I understand the reasoning behind, but, still, it's less.

So yeah Larian are doing less for BG3 than DOS2, so let's not get confused.

EDIT - I will say this - I think when Larian are 2 years into their next project and staring down the barrel of another 2-4+ years on it (because the idea that they can make something that "dwarfs BG3" in less than 5-6 years is pretty laughable, whatever Swen thinks), they may well be thinking "Hmmmm can get get BG3 sales up again, or do we need to sell more of the company to Tencent?" - and so we might see a somewhat later Definitive Edition for BG3, but currently it appears none is planned.

 

[wicked cool]

It seems like the team was burned out and this is unrelated to WOTC. I get the same vibe Bethesda has with fallout/skyrim. The team clearly is either constrained by the rules of 5e/etc. it’s a long road on a project and I doubt it has anything to do with Joe the contact at wotc being terminated.
We were warned by many who played larian games that they don’t do dlc. My guess is we get some fixes and some extra content but that’s probably the video game endings of these characters
As a casual observer I give the wotc/larian relationship an a+ compared to say even BioWare/ea and 99% of any rpg made where there’s multiple partners

Example
Obsidian/bethesda- obsidian in many opinions made the best fallout game and yet that relationship died

since this game was clearly one of the best RPGs we have had in years I really think wotc should get a lot more credit

-they made this deal with larian. Pathfinder didn’t and no other game stepped up
- it looks like sven doesn’t want to do another ip that he doesn’t own . Probably means critical role is off the table etc etc

 

[DarkCrisis]

If you play it a lot you can kind of see where they cut content and shoehorn stuff in.

Not unfinished as such but woukd have been nice to have that stuff.

The City proper was supposed to be a lot bigger apparently. Plus as we have seen, the evil run is undercooked and they are adding to it

 

[Ruin Explorer]

since this game was clearly one of the best RPGs we have had in years I really think wotc should get a lot more credit

For what? Not ruining it?

-they made this deal with larian. Pathfinder didn’t and no other game stepped up

No. Larian approached WotC, made a detailed proposal to make a BG3, and WotC then sat on that, for I believe 2 years, seeing if they got a better offer, and IIRC, even approached other games companies to do a BG3, before "settling" for Larian - now I have no doubt Mearls was genuinely excited about it, but this not something creditable.

- it looks like sven doesn’t want to do another ip that he doesn’t own . Probably means critical role is off the table etc etc

Soooo, the girl I used to date at sixteen who realized she was gay should thank me and give me credit for that? Because I'll be honest I don't think so. I mean, WotC didn't necessarily put Larian off licenced IP for life, and some things you just work out about yourself, rather than them being causal, but it certainly wasn't so great a relationship that Larian wanted to continue it.

So neither of those things seem creditable at first glance.

I think the best we can say about WotC is essentially what Swen's said:

1) WotC had (very much past tense) a good relationship with Larian once they finally decided to let them do BG3.

2) WotC didn't do like GW or the like did and tightly and annoyingly monitor their "lore" to the point of inconveniencing the company. This is an assumption, based on Larian not complaining even jokingly about this, and also a bunch of the lore in the game being kind of rubbish, if we're honest - a bunch is stellar, too - but it's just like one of us writing a campaign for a setting we "know" - there are bits of lore we know well, and bits we don't. Tight lore monitoring might have "fixed" that, but what's the real gain?

3) WotC didn't drive Larian away after the game was done, despite his comments being hard to read otherwise. Presumably Hasbro did, though.

The City proper was supposed to be a lot bigger apparently. Plus as we have seen, the evil run is undercooked and they are adding to it

Yeah Swen was like "Oh, this stuff isn't 'cut content'" but he never really explained why if it's not "cut content", there was an absolute ton of stuff found in the files which showed the Upper City was originally intended to be a place you could go, with encounters, adventures, and so on. It's always a bit difficult to address this because what actually is "cut content"? To hear game designers talk (even ones I respect), there's no such thing, nothing has ever been cut from any game ever, except if it was bad, always it was never intended for release, but inexplicably developed anyway. And I just put that down to feeling they have to be defensive in order to survive in the modern environment of soundbites and gotchas. It's pretty clear Larian cut and revised a ton of BG3, and quite late on, too. It's actually amazing that the later-game is as well put-together as it is.

 

[DarkCrisis]

While they are in there, if they want to better explain Saravok and Vic, that would be great

 

[Vaalingrade]

since this game was clearly one of the best RPGs we have had in years I really think wotc should get a lot more credit

For removing the possibility of a sequel that might not live up to expectations?

 

[Zardnaar]

While they are in there, if they want to better explain Saravok and Vic, that would be great

Yup that content is also very brief.

Karlachs story is also a but wobbly by act 3.

It's 9.5/ high scores really only apply to Act I
Imho. Act3 has some issues nothing fatal just not as good imho.

Think wife beat the game honor mode in 47 hours and she wasn't exactly rushing things. Act2 is really short.

 

[Reynard]

Most cut content is cut for a reason.

 

[Zardnaar]

Most cut content is cut for a reason.

It's often time related. Incomplete.

It shows in parts and apparently some of it is still in the game files.