D&D General WotC: 'Of Course We're Going To Do' Baldur's Gate 4

In an interview with The Game Business, Wizards of the Coast's president John Hight touched on the company's video games plans for Dungeons & Dragons.

Hight told interviewer Christopher Dring “Baldur’s Gate is an incredible game. And of course, we're going to do a successor."

Larian Studios, which made Baldur's Gate 3, has previously indicated that is not going to be involved in any potential sequels.

However, the previously announced game that game studio Giant Skull is currently working on is not Baldur's Gate 4. Hight says "This is not the successor to [Baldur's Gate 3]. We go to Stig and his team to tell an incredible story and bring D&D to a very broad audience. Ideally, the game will appeal to D&D players because it will help them realise their imagination. But it’s also going to hopefully appeal to people that love playing action games, that love the Jedi games, that love God of War games." Giant Skull's game will be a single-player action-adventure game.

Giant Skull's Stig Asmussen spoke a little about that--as yet untitled--game: "A lot of us have grown up on Dungeons & Dragons. And for me, with a new company, this is something that we’re good at. We're good at working with partners. We're good at capturing the spirit of those worlds. It wasn't something that we could just walk away from. It was actually a pretty easy [decision]... Dungeons & Dragons is the definition of a playground. When we had the meeting in Renton [Washington], my mind opened up to the possibilities of what we could do. There’s still a lot of things that we have to abide by. There’s the spirit of Dungeons & Dragons. There are the worlds, player agency and choice, building a party, actions have consequences… those types of things."

Giant Skull was founded by Stig Asmussen in 2023. Asmussen previously was the game director of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, as well as God of War 3.

 

[JConstantine]

I tried larians other games and they weren’t great and the studio was on the ropes. Literally their pitch for Bg3 was so bad they begged fans r a second chance (heard it from a Sven interview)

But again, to be clear, no, Larian were not "on the ropes", that's provably wrong and Swen has never said that.

except that they weren’t on the ropes at all, so not sure where you heard that, but I very much doubt it was from Sven, he would have known better

I think @wicked cool may be getting muddled up here. Swen has spoken multiple times, both briefly and at length, about how Larian were on the verge of bankruptcy prior to D:OS1 (PC Gamer article about it). D:OS1's kickstarter success saved them from that fate, D:OS2's kickstarter success put them in the black enough to start expanding, and BG3's early access success enabled them to continue that expansion so that they have enough studios across enough timezones that they can have someone working on a game 24/7.

Edit: I see this was address in subsequent posts. I should probably catch up on a thread entirely before posting.

 

[wicked cool]

My mistake

I stand by my points that there was a huge reason that Larian went with Bg3 and not d3 and there’s evidence they invested a lot of resources into this

Dragon age inquisition won game of the year but if you ask non video gamers they don’t know much about it
Now if you say Witcher 3, Bg3 , dai or divinity I would speculate only 2 are well known . Pathfinder sold well as well but not getting the acclaim
I went fan expo the other day and 3 Bg3 actors were there. Most know who they are but not a lot know who the voice actors are in divinity 2

The overall beginning of the whole topic was bg4. There is evidence that Larian
-needed wotc
-a year before Bg3 wasn’t strong financially
-needed outside investors along with crowd funding to get off the ground

This wasn’t a slam dunk that this was a sure thing at the time. I jumped on Bg3 on day 1 and I’ve argued that Larian did a lot to make this a beyond immersive game compared to competition
Nobody was saying prior to Bg3 that Bg3 will be maybe the greatest rpg of all time. Not sure how far back I’d have to back on this website for Talk about d2

 

[JConstantine]

Clockwork Revolution, while it's venturing out of the typical CRPG space, is looking like one of the most promising upcoming titles.

Clockwork Revolution looks great.

 

[JConstantine]

EA didn't do the same with DA for reasons I forget - David Gaider explained it once I think).

EA basically ignored Dragon Age because fantasy games don't sell as well as sci-fi games, so they were mostly left to their own devices, but also didn't get the same amount of funding. ME3 pissing off fans with it's ending contributed to EA giving DA a shot and increasing funding for Inquisition (which is why it's more polished than the previous installments).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Pathfinder sold well as well but not getting the acclaim

It didn't actually. Not compared to the other games you named.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker sold 2m copies in 6.5 years.
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous sold 1m copies in 1.5 years. There are no more up-to-date records I can find so I presume it may not have crossed 2m copies sold yet.

Divinity: Original 2 sold 1m copies in 2 months. Insanely faster. In 5 years it sold 7.5m copies.

Dragon Age: Inquisition sold 12m copies over an unclear amount of time - seems to be 9+ years. It's Bioware's most successful game.

Witcher 3 sold like 5m quite quickly and is north of 50m now, it's incomparably larger.

So Pathfinder isn't even close to DOS2, whereas DOS2 and DAI are pretty close sales-wise, and I daresay when DOS2 has been out 9 years they may be closer still.

 

[wicked cool]

It didn't actually. Not compared to the other games you named.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker sold 2m copies in 6.5 years.
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous sold 1m copies in 1.5 years. There are no more up-to-date records I can find so I presume it may not have crossed 2m copies sold yet.

Divinity: Original 2 sold 1m copies in 2 months. Insanely faster. In 5 years it sold 7.5m copies.

Dragon Age: Inquisition sold 12m copies over an unclear amount of time - seems to be 9+ years. It's Bioware's most successful game.

Witcher 3 sold like 5m quite quickly and is north of 50m now, it's incomparably larger.

So Pathfinder isn't even close to DOS2, whereas DOS2 and DAI are pretty close sales-wise, and I daresay when DOS2 has been out 9 years they may be closer still.

And yet it doesn’t get the press here or really anywhere outside of a smaller community in some ways like dragon age inquisition
Based on everything you have said divinity 3 must be the next game

Thus topic once again is about bg4. I have faith in wotc until they prove me wrong . Some studio will want what Larian got out of the ip

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Based on everything you have said divinity 3 must be the next game

I mean, you'd think right?

But Swen specifically said it wasn't one of the two games they were developing next after BG3, and repeated that later. Probably for the best for the reasons @JConstantine and I were discussing.

Thus topic once again is about bg4. I have faith in wotc until they prove me wrong . Some studio will want what Larian got out of the ip

Then we're back to the key problem.

WotC want to do it with an in-house studio, or at least that's what they're saying right now.

WotC don't have any AAA studios with experience making CRPGs.

WotC don't have any studios at all who are working on a CRPG (Indie, AA or AAA).

Hopefully they'll eventually wise up and offer it to a non-WotC studio

 

[JConstantine]

I mean, even before EA, they'd already dumped Durge as the default PC, and they later did say originally Durge was going to be the only custom-class/race option, but even the semi-internal pre-EA testing they did caused them to ditch that and go to Tav. So they can make these kind of smart decisions, and the crazy money they've made has to help there, surely?

The origin characters, like the humour, is the sort of thing that makes me wonder. They shouldn't need feedback to make this decision - outside of a preestablished character like Geralt (or now Ciri) for The Witcher, it's well known that players would prefer to create their own custom character. Look at the naughty word BioWare got for Hawke, for example.

Put it far better than I could! I would have said similar but with like 2500 words and a lot of repetition!

 

[mamba]

I go by what I read. Most cases if you report 2 years of losses in a row you are in finial hardship (they reported 1) They had flirted with bankruptcy in the past and went all in on Bg3

this is over a span of 10+ years, they flirted with bankruptcy before DOS1, never after. The success of DOS2 allowed them to go all in on BG3 (instead of keeping it at a level of ‘slightly improved DOS2’).

So you are only going by what you read in the sense that all the words appear in the article, but the chain of events you describe is contradicted by it…

 

[mamba]

More information and somewhat speculation
Sven own 51% of the company but 30% is owned by a company called tencent which is a multinational company
My guess is they desperately needed the ip to get the investment needed to make Bg3

Swen owns 62%, the Tencent investment probably was in 2018. Maybe the Tencent investment helped them with getting Hasbro on board or having the funds to go AAA and basically double the team for BG3, no idea. It is not what saved them from ‘the brink of bankruptcy’ in 2022, that bit never happened