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.

 

[Jadeite]

People who are no longer there.

Yes, that's why I used italics for the were. But the user I quoted said that there was no positive involvement of WotC at all.

As for the chances of WotC creating a worthy BG4, they weren't even able to create of proper Dark Alliance. Which is a shame, Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance 2 was great.

 

[yakdm]

I mean they can try. But BG3 was successful because:

• It had fantastic writing and characters
• The cast was top notch
• The gameplay was solid and fresh
• Larian is an excellent developer who made a game to appease players not shareholders
• It was a damn good adaptation of 5e

I think the D&D IP was a very small reason for the success of BG3. In other words, whatever Larian makes next is probably going to be an absolute masterpiece and we know it won’t be D&D.

Are there other studios that could make something good? Definitely. Will it be BG3 level? Probably not. Obsidian and Owlcat are great CRPG developers but there are a fair amount of people that loved BG3 and bounced off of Pathfinder and PoE. For posterity I love the Pathfinder CRPGs and Rogue Trader but they’re clunky.

 

[belsonic]

I don't think it'll be either of those studios, honestly; they both seem involved in pretty dedicated projects. It'd be funny if things went full circle and they brought it over to BioWare, but outside of me being personally amused, I'd be pretty apprehensive if that would happen, given that I was unimpressed with Veilguard (outside of the fact that that game shipped at all, which by all accounts seemed like a Herculean feat) and the dire straits the studio is currently in.

 

[Lidgar]

I think there is room in the world for a mature Dark Sun video game, where you start as a gladiator and end up ruling the City State, with a mix of Conan, Gladiator, and Dune. Use a really stylized (Brom-Like) art to make it look different from everything else on the stands.

I’d be all over that. Just find it doubtful that is something that a WotC game studio would do well. One can hope.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I mean they can try. But BG3 was successful because:

• It had fantastic writing and characters
• The cast was top notch
• The gameplay was solid and fresh
• Larian is an excellent developer who made a game to appease players not shareholders
• It was a damn good adaptation of 5e

I think the D&D IP was a very small reason for the success of BG3. In other words, whatever Larian makes next is probably going to be an absolute masterpiece and we know it won’t be D&D.

I think Larian's next one is a bit more of a dice-roll than "probably a masterpiece" because Swen is both very influential within his company, an agent of chaos, and has bad taste (but also seems like a good guy apart from that), and Swen has sort of implied he wants more influence again (than he had with BG3, where he had less influence, it seems than DOS1/2) because he doesn't think he has many more games in him.

Like there are several ways it could go wrong:

1) They don't make a CRPG.

I think from stuff Swen has said there's a reasonable chance they make a different-but-related genre like tactical RPG and this will sell literally 50% or far less as many copies at the same relative quality level. You could make the best Western tactical RPG in history but you're not going to touch BG3 numbers.

2) Bad setting leading to bad vibes.

Rivellon would be a good example. Rivellon is an ultra-grimdark "crapsack world" setting. Edgy teenagers of all ages (I know some edgy teens in their 50s...) love this, but they aren't actually that reliable about buying games set in those settings. If BG3 had instead been set in Rivellon, all other things being equal, it would have been a moderate success that people kept going on about but which probably took 5 years to break 10m copies sold, not 5 months. Unfortunately, Swen loves grimdark and sneers at all non-grimdark settings.

I do think they could completely get away with grimdark if they went SF instead of fantasy. A cyberpunk, dieselpunk, steampunk, spacepunk, or w/e setting that was pretty grimdark would probably be a lot more accepted, even then a "straight SF" setting.

3) Bad system leading to unenjoyable combat for non-weirdoes.

DOS2 would be an example. DOS2 has a bizarre, deeply counter-intuitive combat system that requires you to understand the mechanics really well and basically cover the entire screen with flaming surfaces or similar, which constantly making small upgrades to your equipment in a very annoying way that isn't actually well-supported by the game! They got away with this in DOS2 because DOS1's system wasn't as bad, and a lot of reviewers (rather unhelpfully) implied it was basically the same (did they even play it lol? Re-reading some of the reviews the answer is pretty clearly that they spent like 8-10 hours playing it with friends, essentially ignored the mechanics, just placed and exploded barrels, and had a good time but... that was a different era for reviewing). I don't think the level of scrutiny they'd get with a new game would let this slide again. Again unfortunately Swen is a madman here, literally on the eve of BG3's release he was saying on camera that DOS2 had a much better game system than BG3 (!!!), and he was not joking, he clearly believed it. But... maybe he changed his mind after BG3 sold a gazillion copies?

They could also have a system that is really good but just really strange and I think that would cause them some... sales issues.

I mean there are other ways too, but these are the main three "threats" I see. And I think they're real enough that unless they turn out to be releasing a CRPG with an original (non-Rivellon) setting, it's not actually "probable" that they'll make a masterpiece. If it is a CRPG and has an original RPG, I guess it does shift to "probable", but the threat of a terrible weird system is high, especially given Swen's recent comment:

"You'll have plenty of fun" "in a surprising way".

Like bro. Dude. Dude-apotamus. Has that phrase ever actually ended well? Because I don't think so. I think every single time a developer or moviemaker has said something will be "fun in a surprising way!!!", it's been an absolute car crash, and not the sexy David Cronenberg 1996 kind of Crash.

If you just drop that one "in a surprising way" sentence, the whole tweet is cool and non-threatening so maybe I should just act like I never read it lol?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't think it'll be either of those studios, honestly; they both seem involved in pretty dedicated projects. It'd be funny if things went full circle and they brought it over to BioWare, but outside of me being personally amused, I'd be pretty apprehensive if that would happen, given that I was unimpressed with Veilguard (outside of the fact that that game shipped at all, which by all accounts seemed like a Herculean feat) and the dire straits the studio is currently in.

Bioware are probably locked up for the next 5+ years with making ME5 or dying trying (especially as they have to essentially rehire back up to an AAA level after being made to fire everyone), and then DLC if it's not a complete flop. Also if it's not a flop, I would fully expect EA to say "Ur the mass effect studio now do it agian" and have them start on ME6. So I think that's unlikely.

For posterity I love the Pathfinder CRPGs and Rogue Trader but they’re clunky.

Both are clunky specifically because they're either directly emulating or heavily inspired by overcomplicated tabletop rules though. Which D&D isn't.

 

[TheSword]

No, it could not have been.

That wouldn't have made any sense at all. I think you're reading this and seeing a sentiment you don't agree with and not looking at the distinction I'm making.

When BG1 came out, companies pretty much never spent years and years working on a game, then ditched it because they had years to go. It was extremely rare. Now? It's very common, especially for corporate companies working on AAAs. Games get canned when they're 80, 90, even 99% finished.

So you absolutely could not have said that when BG1 came out, it would have been a lunatic thing to say, especially as Bioware were independent.

Same for BG2, plus, more importantly, the same company was working on it, so it would have been nonsensical.


What opinion?

WotC didn't make BG3. Larian did.

I'm talking a big corporate company making games, not a hungry indie company who depend on it. WotC outsourced BG3 to Larian. Larian were a rapidly growing just-barely-AAA company who were attracting investments and BG3 was pretty make-or-break for them. They couldn't just cancel it halfway through and walk off, at least not without firing 90% of their staff and tanking the reputation and earnings of the management.

This is what you seem to be confused about - there's a profound difference between an independent company who have choices over what games they make, and when they "give up" on a game, and a studio owned by a publisher, where the publisher decides when they give up on the game, and where the publisher is a large corporate company with fairly regularly changing middle and upper management, where it may be politically beneficial for you to cancel the game your predecessor commissioned, because you can then say "Well it was costing us $30m a year and we'd been at it for 3 years and were expected to be working on it for another 2 years at least, and my projections said it had a 60% chance of not making that money back, so I saved us $60m+, please give me a bonus of a few percent of that for my heroism!", which is absolutely how it works in a lot of these places.


I think most people would agree.

But that doesn't change anything.

The issue is WotC seem to want to develop it in-house. As they're a fairly political (internally) corporate company with a long history of cancelling and ending and changing products when management changes (or even when it doesn't!), and owned by a very greedy and shortsighted company who will do LITERALLLY ANYTHING for a stock bump (Hasbro), it's vastly more likely that a BG4 will get cancelled during development. Many shareholders just don't pay very close attention and are extremely short-term-ish, and whilst "WotC cancels BG4" might cause a small stock drop for Hasbro, "Hasbro causes WotC to fire entire game studio" will usually cause a big stock bump.

What I don’t share is the general sense of pessimism.
Great games can come from small studios or large ones.
I’ve seen a great franchise be wrecked by the same studio that made the first two installments. Larrian keeping it is no guarantee of success either.

Game franchises come and go, some installments are better than others. It’s just how things roll.
It feels like you’re making a lot of generalizations with a heck of a lot of certainty for someone predicting something that’s what 5+ years out?