It turns out that Larian did start work on a Baldur’s Gate 4, but it doesn’t sound like they were thrilled about it.
In a new interview with PC Gamer, Larian CEO Swen Vincke outlined exactly how he and the rest of the studio were feeling.
While the fans were elated about Baldur’s Gate 3 last year, Larian weren’t exactly coming out of it happy. Swen said:
“So if something is super successful, obviously everyone’s [asking] you, ‘When are you going to make the next one?’ And when you, as a developer, come out of this little miserable cave that you’ve been sitting in for many, many hours as you’re finishing your thing, you’re vulnerable. “
Swen then explained that Larian went along with the fans suggesting that they make new content, and eventually got around to working on the aforementioned sequel. But then, he said this.
“It’s something that you all would have liked, I think. I’m sure, actually. And we actually went pretty fast, because the production machine was still warm. You could already play stuff. But you played it and you looked and it, and, like, you know, this is OK. I mean, we’ll probably have to redo it 10 times. And do we really want to do this for the next three years? “
At this point, we’ll interject that Larian published Baldur’s Gate 3 on Steam Early Access in October 2020, but at that point, they already had the first chapter, making up 25 hours of content. Larian announced the project in E3 2019, so even that early on, they spent nearly a year to get the Early Access stuff ready.
Now, Larian had previously said that they could go further on Baldur’s Gate 3 because they had already maxed out the possible levels for the characters. But it’s clear here that they were truly no longer enjoying making their own GOTY.
And so, when Swen made the decision to cancel Baldur’s Gate 4 and move on, over the holidays, and then told Larian after the holidays, there was a real sense of elation in the studio.
“Honestly, you really cannot explain or express it, how liberated we are. So morale is super high, just because we’re doing new stuff again. We’re doing our own thing again, we’re not rehashing, we’re not trying to convert rules from 50 years ago into something new.”
Swen does make it clear in this interview that they did not have a problem with Hasbro, or the Dungeons & Dragons rulebook, but they really wanted to move on and do something else. As of today, they are working on two different games, but of course, we won’t hear about them for now. If they aren’t quite as GOTY worthy as Baldur’s Gate 3, we hope that Larian gets to show us something new that maybe we didn’t expect from them.
