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​

​

 

[Stalker0]

People can argue how much of this is WOTC's doing, but ultimately its the CEO of the studios' call. Some will call this brave, maintaining your creative visions in the face of corporate greed. Others will think this the dumbest business decision ever....you have a game that is lightning in a bottle kind of money (the kind that other studios can only dream of), and your not willing to commit a small amount of more resources to get even more profits locked down.

Time will tell of course, and the success (or failure) of their next project will be the arbiter. It does well, the CEO was a visionary genius. It does poorly, the CEO had his head in the clouds and should have focused on stone cold dollars rather than pipedreams.

 

[CapnZapp]

Well clearly this is all Wizards of the Coast's fault. There's no other possible explanation.

Thank you for summarizing the facts with no needless clutter!

 

[Incenjucar]

My hope is that they move on to make a Pathfinder game, though a Critical Role game would also be hilarious.

 

[Scribe]

My hope is that they move on to make a Pathfinder game, though a Critical Role game would also be hilarious.

Wrath of the Righteous is crazy good. I personally found it better than BG3, and BG3 is of course crazy good as well.

 

[teitan]

Well clearly this is all Wizards of the Coast's fault. There's no other possible explanation.

I eagerly await the reactionary YouTube video that explains this fact in detail.

Professor DM will heed the call.

 

[Umbran]

My hope is that they move on to make a Pathfinder game, though a Critical Role game would also be hilarious.

They just said they want to work on their own content, not licensing someone else's. So, I'd not hold out much hope of further adaptations.

 

[Weiley31]

They came, they saw, they conquered.

 

[Lidgar]

Swen also said they are not done patching BG 3, including adding better mod support and more cinematics for different endings.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

Well clearly this is all Wizards of the Coast's fault. There's no other possible explanation.

I eagerly await the reactionary YouTube video that explains this fact in detail.

Oh absolutely they were already working on a DLC, and planning BG4, you don't just drop that, especially after BG3 made a ton of money for all invovled.

If you look at Swen complaining about greedy publishers rescently, even though WotC wasn't a publusher for BG3, its not hard to see the connection.

So absolutely sick of WotC under Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks and WotC President Cynthia Williams, its like company is run by incompetent Ferengi.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Wrath of the Righteous is crazy good. I personally found it better than BG3, and BG3 is of course crazy good as well.

I think how people feel about WotR depends extremely heavily on how much the like PF1's system, which specific path they took, whether they played RtwP or TB, their tolerance for bugs, and their attitude to the overworld combat,

Personally the overworld combat stuff just ruined the game for me, even with that set on easy, it got so boring and annoying that I just gave up. But if you turned it to autowin/skip, it was both buggy and you missed entire bits of the game (not overworld combat bits either, story bits). I didn't come here to play the world's worst Might & Magic clone, but I'm apparently forced to do it if I don't want bad story consequences, missing out on items/places/events and so on!

Other minuses for me:

1) It's designed for RtwP and makes no compromises for TB despite having it in from launch - there are huge numbers of completely trivial and pointless fights on TB. Not the only game with this issue, nor the worst impacted, but it's bad unless you just love procedurally deleting easy encounters there solely for attrition purposes.

2) PF1 builds require you to either be a PF1 expert or follow guides, or you have a like a 70% chance of ending up with a junked character at some point along the way because you didn't take the right Feat at Level X or had a stat 1 point too low when you hit Level Y, or you multiclassed at the wrong level, or you picked the wrong race. Less bad than Kingmaker at least because of better info display.

3) Character writing quality ranged wildly from "Basically on-par with BG3" (Daeran, for example) to "Did a young teenager write this on AO3 and it accidentally got put in the game?" (Nenio), with most being in-between. At least they managed to write Nenio so you could clap back to their nonsense, where in Kingmaker you just had to get owned repeatedly by Jubilost because even if you had higher INT/WIS/CHA and social skills than him (very likely if you were playing a Bard, for example), his writer had determined that was how it was going to go. So an improvement on the previous!

4) This might just be me, but I found the main narrative to be incredibly boring and forgettable, it's probably the only CRPG I've played where I literally forgot what was going on and what my goals were, overall narrative-wise. I'm told some paths work a lot better than others here (apparently Angel is very good).

It also had the characteristic Owlcat needless verbosity, and obviously I am a man just smashing by my own glass house here given how verbose I am (!!!), but a lot of the dialogue/narrative writing was bad because it wasn't written be said by a voice actor, it was written to be read in a text box, and was junk no-one would ever say in a million years, just meandering sentences that had they made a voice actor read them, they'd have realized how ultra-awkward they were.

Despite all this it was pretty good, but I don't think really in the same league as BG3 for my money. It's like a solid 8/10 game a very few people will remember 15 years from now next to 10/10 classic which will be a point of comparison for decades.

Rogue Trader managed to improve on all this except the narrative (let's not get into that lol) - I feel like Owlcat get stronger every game, but they really need to get over their own opposition to voice acting. Their CEO was recently saying "If we did full voice-acting, it would cost us money and force us to write differently!", and it's like, yes it would, but it would also move more copies of your games, and force you to write better! No-one needs you to do full cinematics, just like pay the fairly minimal rates voice actors ask, rather than randomly having like 30% of the game voiced and 70% not, with seemingly no relationship to whether it's important or not.