D&D General No More Baldur's Gate From Larion: Team Is 'Elated'

Bad news for Baldur's Gate fans--It seems that Larion is out of the Baldur's Gate business. CEO Swen Vicke has announced that Baldur's Gate 3 is not getting any expansions, DLC, or a sequel. Patches and fixes will still continue, however, including cross-platform mod support.

"Because of all the success the obvious thing would have been to do a DLC, so we started on one. We started even thinking about BG4. But we hadn’t really had closure on BG3 yet and just to jump forward on something new felt wrong. We had also spent a whole bunch of time converting the system into a video game and we wanted to do new things. There are a lot of constraints on making D&D, and 5th Edition is not an easy system to put into a video game. We had all these ideas of new combat we wanted to try out and they were not compatible."

-Swen Vicke​

Vicke confirmed this at a talk at the Game Developers Conference, and said that Larion Studios wanted to make its own new content rather than license IP from another company.

He also clarified that a Baldur's Gate 4 was still possible, but that if it happened it would not be made by Larion. Larion is already working on its next big release.

According to IGN, Larion has started work on some BG3 DLC, but it was cancelled.

"You could see the team was doing it because everyone felt like we had to do it, but it wasn’t really coming from the heart, and we’re very much a studio from the heart. It’s what gotten us into misery and it’s also been the reasons for our success."

-Swen Vicke​

According to Vicke, when the BG3 team found out that they would not be making more Baldur's Gate content, they were 'elated'.

“I thought they were going to be angry at me because I just couldn’t muster the energy. I saw so many elated faces, which I didn’t expect, and I could tell they shared the same feelings, so we were all aligned with one another. And I’ve had so many developers come to me after and say, ‘Thank god.'"

-Swen Vicke​

​

 

[Azzy]

Golden handshake - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Jesus wept! This reality is trash.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

So I think it's safe to say there will never be a DM mode for BG3, unless someone goes far beyond what even normal modding could do.

I think it's safe to say that such a kit would be very very difficult for most people to use! And even someone with the skills would need years to make something halfway decent.

 

[DarkCrisis]

I agree with a lot of what you say except the part about stuff in the novels not being canon, the contract with Ed Greenwood states that novels are canon and can't be decanonized, that perhaps the most unique thing about FR, it can never be rebooted, its a forever living setting.

You’d be amazed how much they can bend that.

Oh sure Lord Whatever died in novel 7 that’s canon….. except that really wasn’t him!

Not to mention the pure “rewritting” of say an evil Lich does a Back to the Future and changes things. Well sure all that old written stuff still happened but Vecna stopped Lorain from meeting George and now there is new future history that was can write! 100 year time jump? Never happened! (They aren’t going to do this btw)

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Founder and CEO of Larian Games, developer of Baldur's Gate 3 addressed some online discussion in is latest tweet.


I think people need to realize that these are creatives. If you work on the same thing for 7 years (and support it for a little while more), you might want to move on to something else. Has anyone here been a DM on a campaign for 7 years? You get tired of it at some point.

I hope they make something great, but after I bounced off of DOS2 and learnt that what I don't like about BG3 are "Larianisms" I don't expect much for me.

If you go back and look at the early interviews Sven gave after release of BG3, he repeatedly says Larian are now ready to move on the something new. This announcement does not surprise me at all.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

You’d be amazed how much they can bend that.

Oh sure Lord Whatever died in novel 7 that’s canon….. except that really wasn’t him!

Not to mention the pure “rewritting” of say an evil Lich does a Back to the Future and changes things. Well sure all that old written stuff still happened but Vecna stopped Lorain from meeting George and now there is new future history that was can write! 100 year time jump? Never happened! (They aren’t going to do this btw)

They can bend it, but they can't break it.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

They can bend it, but they can't break it.

That’s often a distinction without a difference.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

That’s often a distinction without a difference.

No its very distinct and it matters fir casuality.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

They can bend it, but they can't break it.

What is FR canon, though? WotC themselves were clear that unless it appeared in a WotC-produced 5E book, it definitely wasn't canon, and you can't even rely on adventures because they can have multiple outcomes or ways of happening.

So there's not a huge amount to break/bend.

No its very distinct and it matters fir casuality.

You might be right if you said this about say, Star Wars, which maintains a very strict and clear canon, right down a guy dedicated to personally keeping track of that full time. But you are flatly wrong re: The Forgotten Realms, which has a much looser canon and which WotC themselves are quite happy to retcon or change, as they specifically expressed. Also, I love BG3, but it's grasp on FR lore and canon is... variable. There are parts where they make some deep lore cuts and it's pretty wild, and there are others where they don't seem to understand basic stuff about the FR (like that not all nor even most followers of Gond are gnomes, nor is Gond's church based primarily out of Baldur's Gate - and most of the followers of Ilmater we see would be instantly cast out of the church as horrible people with behaviours directly opposed to Ilmater's teachings, should any conventional-minded Ilmaterite cleric ever visit that place!).

If you go back and look at the early interviews Sven gave after release of BG3, he repeatedly says Larian are now ready to move on the something new. This announcement does not surprise me at all.

Yes he was very specific that they were going to work on a number of smaller games rather than anything big initially, too. I think was because they expected BG3 to do only slightly better numbers than DOS2. Certainly other industry players (like Microsoft) likewise thought it would be a moderate success.

As of right now, it's at a minimum at 15m sales, and that's a dead minimum, because previous Larian have said DOS1 sold 2.5m copies over several years, DOS2 sold "3x DOS1" up to like 2022 (so over about 5 years), i.e. at least 7.5m (that's the lowest figure it could be), and they've now said BG3 has already sold "2x DOS2", over significantly less than a year. And all of those did that without DLC, note - DLC definitely helps the value proposition of a game, and helps it to sell by putting it and various improvements back in the news, but eventually it just becomes part of the package, and 3+ years on, you're probably selling mostly on the strength of the base game (unless DLC just game out, like Cyberpunk 2077!).

More recent comments from Swen and others seem to suggest that rather than working on several smaller projects, they were working on one big one which will "dwarf BG3" (what exactly he meant by this is hard to say), presumably alongside the DLC, so are now presumably all working on the big DLC.

This would certainly tally with the elation and so on - I don't think being on the team left making DLC whilst the rest of the company works on some (presumably amazing-seeming) mega-game (presumably a CRPG given Swen directly compared it to BG3, rather than saying it would be "very different" or something, he simply said it would be much bigger) would have been making people very happy, nor would delaying an extremely cool game for months or years to get out DLC for an already-excellent game that doesn't even really have a DLC-shaped hole in it. It's a bit they made the epilogue hint at DLC - I wonder if they'll change that when they add the additional ending material they've talked about about.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think it's safe to say that such a kit would be very very difficult for most people to use! And even someone with the skills would need years to make something halfway decent.

Absolutely, and that's the key issue - a lot of companies work really hard to put out content-creation tools for their games, and they're usually used only by literally dozens to very low hundreds of modders in the entire world to actually create content in the sense of entire adventures (even small ones), places (that aren't just a house to hang out in), and so on. Whereas you'll often have far large numbers modding gameplay, character models, etc. I think Larian are smart to not go too hard on this - open it up as much as possible, for sure, but don't work too hard on making them accessible - even if you do most people just won't do anything with them, even most modders.

I suspect down the line (10+ years from now) there may be procedural-based, AI-assisted tools for future games that do open up content creation considerably for future games, but they'll only come player-side when devs have been using them for a long time, and currently most AI assist stuff is "off site" and costs money, so couldn't be part of a player-oriented tool unless there was a subscription or something.

 

[Parmandur]

What is FR canon, though? WotC themselves were clear that unless it appeared in a WotC-produced 5E book, it definitely wasn't canon, and you can't even rely on adventures because they can have multiple outcomes or ways of happening.

So there's not a huge amount to break/bend.

Indeed, the only canon WotC has stated they are holding their "partners" to is what is in the three core books (currently being redone, with retconning Lore to be more current no doubt a major factor in there being new books sideeye at Orc lore in 2014 books). And by "partners" in their canon statement, they pretty clearly meant Paramount and Larian. As long as Larian didncotnradict any lore in the core rulebooks...and that ain't much...then WotC straight up doesn't care. Larian's FR is Larian's take, same as my FR ia my take, or any other DM.

You might be right if you said this about say, Star Wars, which maintains a very strict and clear canon, right down a guy dedicated to personally keeping track of that full time. But you are flatly wrong re: The Forgotten Realms, which has a much looser canon and which WotC themselves are quite happy to retcon or change, as they specifically expressed. Also, I love BG3, but it's grasp on FR lore and canon is... variable. There are parts where they make some deep lore cuts and it's pretty wild, and there are others where they don't seem to understand basic stuff about the FR (like that not all nor even most followers of Gond are gnomes, nor is Gond's church based primarily out of Baldur's Gate - and most of the followers of Ilmater we see would be instantly cast out of the church as horrible people with behaviours directly opposed to Ilmater's teachings, should any conventional-minded Ilmaterite cleric ever visit that place!).

The Forgotten Realms is a pantry for cooking, not a museum for preservation.