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

In an interview with The Game Business, Wizard 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 personally would love to see a game set in Eberron, as it's my favorite setting, followed closely by Planescape and Spelljammer.

I'd murderhobo for an Eberron game.

 

[JConstantine]

Weren’t there new subclasses? Someone mentioned them.

Ok. So DLC that isn’t DLC, who’s doing that?

Larian released a new subclass for each class in a major update patch. They simply don't do DLC.

The only other way content gets added to the game is via mods by fans. Larian released a toolkit specifically for this, similar to what BioWare did for NWN.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I don't think Obsidian is actually a realistic candidate at this point. They moved on from licensing to creating their own IPs a decade ago - Pillars of Eternity, Outer Worlds, most recently Avowed. The Microsoft money would make licensing more accessible for them, but Microsoft want their own IPs, so it's even less likely.

Owlcat honestly seems like the only choice. They've been carving out a nice little niche for themselves of cRPGs of popular (within geekdom anyway) franchises.

I guess Tactical Adventures (Solasta) is a possibility. They've arguably been the most faithful to the tabletop mechanics, but the narrative has been lacklustre.

I would love to see Tactical Adventures get a licence to port the PHB classes into their game but writing wise they are a fair distance from the needed standard.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't think Obsidian is actually a realistic candidate at this point. They moved on from licensing to creating their own IPs a decade ago - Pillars of Eternity, Outer Worlds, most recently Avowed. The Microsoft money would make licensing more accessible for them, but Microsoft want their own IPs, so it's even less likely.

Owlcat honestly seems like the only choice. They've been carving out a nice little niche for themselves of cRPGs of popular (within geekdom anyway) franchises.

I guess Tactical Adventures (Solasta) is a possibility. They've arguably been the most faithful to the tabletop mechanics, but the narrative has been lacklustre.

Grounded is even bigger than Avowed/Outer Worlds as an Obsidian IP, it's not as high-profile among "gamers" but has sold pretty wild numbers and Grounded 2 sold 600k copies immediately when it launched into Early Access on Steam. Sorry just thought I should add that in!

But yeah definitely Obsidian have focused on their own IPs. I think it would be possible for MS to persuade Obsidian's CEO (who is a bit of a money weasel) to work on a BG4 but it might have blowback, like, I am confident JE Sawyer is prepared to walk if Obsidian did something dumb enough (would that be dumb enough? Unclear) and they might lose other high-profile employees, but I dunno.

Agree re: Tactical Adventures. They just don't have even close to the writing chops needed, and whilst you can hire writers, you kind of need a vision of what sort of writing you want, and to be willing and able to spend money and take risks to get them. Like, Larian took big, big risks with BG3's lead writers - neither had written for a videogame before, and one of them had never written published fiction before, she was an academic! Yet the themes she focused on are absolutely core to BG3 and what makes the story compelling (identity and trauma).

 

[darjr]

Larian released a new subclass for each class in a major update patch. They simply don't do DLC.

The only other way content gets added to the game is via mods by fans. Larian released a toolkit specifically for this, similar to what BioWare did for NWN.

I guess I just misunderstood. DLC is story content only? Subclasses don’t count as “DLC”.

But Larian did that work is what I wanted to know.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The only other way content gets added to the game is via mods by fans. Larian released a toolkit specifically for this, similar to what BioWare did for NWN.

I'll be very interested to see how successful this is.

Fan projects using such toolkits have a long, long history of fizzling out somewhere between 10 and 60% of the way through development, usually after making a big splash and getting people very excited.

Very few which aren't simply recreations of other games (Skyblivion etc.) have actually made it to completion. Fallout: London did, and it's kind of a beautiful disaster.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I guess I just misunderstood. DLC is story content only? Subclasses don’t count as “DLC”.

But Larian did that work is what I wanted to know.

DLC means downloadable content - i.e. OPTIONAL content you can, if you wish, download (paid or otherwise). It has to be OPTIONAL to be "downloadable content". Otherwise it's just "content"!

The subclasses are not optional. They're just part of Patch 8, literally called "The Final Patch" by Larian. There will be no more - or so they claim.

For example, let's look at Rogue Trader. Rogue Trader has two major DLCs - Void Shadows and Lex Imperialis. Both of them cost money, and you don't have to have them. When each was added, the game was updated and changed, and some content added for all players, but the classes and characters and stories and areas of the DLC were only added for the people who downloaded the (paid) DLC.

TLDR: Game updates aren't DLC.

 

[JConstantine]

I guess I just misunderstood. DLC is story content only? Subclasses don’t count as “DLC”.

I was typing up a response, but basically what @Ruin Explorer said. Subclasses (or classes, or spells or whatever) could be DLC, but it would have to be optional content (Necromancer for Diablo 3, for example). Larian added the subclasses as part of a patch that people had to download, so it was just free content.

 

[TheSword]

More like "Of course we're going to attempt to make BG4, waste an insane amount of money on it, and either cancel it 3+ years into production, or release a game that isn't even a shadow of BG3".

I don't even mean that like, meanly. I think that's the only plausible outcome here if they develop with one of their in-house studios. If they hand it off to a truly excellent development studio outside the WotC family, maybe that could work, but who would even be interested? And they seem to be indicating here that they wouldn't hand it off. That said, a lot can change.

My personal expectation is that WotC dilly-dallies on this until we're literally in a new edition of D&D, and that we won't see a BG4 for 10+ years from now. In the intervening 4-6 years before production actually starts WotC could very easily drastically change their digital strategy for better or even for worse.

Could the same argument not be said about BG1. Same with BG2.
If this opinion carried the day then we would never have seen BG3.

We don’t know what might come down the line. For me Bg4 doesn’t have to be better. It just has to be a good enjoyable game.

 

[JConstantine]

I'll be very interested to see how successful this is.

Fan projects using such toolkits have a long, long history of fizzling out somewhere between 10 and 60% of the way through development, usually after making a big splash and getting people very excited.

Very few which aren't simply recreations of other games (Skyblivion etc.) have actually made it to completion. Fallout: London did, and it's kind of a beautiful disaster.

Yeah. In my experience, it's basically only the cosmetic and QoL stuff that actually gets finished. I never bothered with any for NWN, but I'd pour over content for Morrowind (and dabbled with the toolset myself). I think I can count on one hand the amount of story/quest/NPC content mods that actually got "completed".