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.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I personally believe that Sigil was an attempt at empire building by someone(s) and an attempt to replace Beyond. Mostly due to the fact that it appears to ignore all the benefits that Beyond integration could provide.

Work on Sigil started before the Beyond acquisition, and head of WotC's digital was actually opposed to the Beyond acquisition (this came out, of all times, during the OGL 2.0 deal), so yeah I don't think there's any question internal politics was in play here.

Interesting re: the small updates - it's more than nothing!

I always thought that Sigil was premature. A 2D VTT is relatively simple compared to 3D, building a 3D map is time consuming and one area that strikes me as ideal for AI automation. Create something that can transform a 2D map into 3D and allow the addition of decor, set dressing and does fog of war, line of sight.

Yeah that was striking, given literally no-one had successfully made a fully-featured 3D VTT successfully before. Some real "running before walking" stuff.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Work on Sigil started before the Beyond acquisition, and head of WotC's digital was actually opposed to the Beyond acquisition (this came out, of all times, during the OGL 2.0 deal), so yeah I don't think there's any question internal politics was in play here.

I did not know they had started before the Beyond acquisition, pretty short sighted in my opinion. A case of "not invented here". If they had embraced Beyond, integrated with and built out dual use stuff, a 2d VTT, encounter and campaign management with a smaller unit working on the 3d engine they might have saved some or all of their jobs.

Interesting re: the small updates - it's more than nothing!


Yeah that was striking, given literally no-one had successfully made a fully-featured 3D VTT successfully before. Some real "running before walking" stuff.

I think to make 3D VTT really shine, it needs cheap and fairly ubiquitous AR tech, the kind that Microsoft was mucking about with 10 years ago with Kinect and Hololens. But at less than $200 a pop. Especially if one can manage mixed reality.

 

[Hamilburg]

[edit] nevermind. Not going to be Micah in here.

 

[Parmandur]

I personally believe that Sigil was an attempt at empire building by someone(s) and an attempt to replace Beyond. Mostly due to the fact that it appears to ignore all the benefits that Beyond integration could provide.

It was Chris Cao, who succed3d with Magic Arena, and they started before WotC bought Beyond.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

It was Chris Cao, who succed3d with Magic Arena, and they started before WotC bought Beyond.

Very probably but I am usually reticent to place the entire responsibility on one set of shoulders without more evidence. Usually, people like Cao have their enablers in the hierarchy.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Just thinking about D&DBeyond from the player or DM perspective, if the current campaign notes and players notes where replaced with a blog (or microblog in the case of the players) where the updates could be added as separate post and the different post hyperlinked to (perhaps adding some tagging) this would go a long way to making it useful for campaign management.

Add in some social tools, like blogging, and a way to search the old articles and pin interesting articles and the whole site become much more usable.
I always thought that many of the concepts behind Gleemax were sound it was the execution and UI that sucked beyond belief.