Everything we know about Baldur’s Gate 4
Baldur’s Gate 3 took the gaming world by storm in 2023. With a dense, resonant story populated by complex and lovable characters, frankly unbelievable player freedom, and a low barrier to entry whether you were familiar with the franchise or not, Larian Studios proved that there’s still a huge, hungry audience for the massive single-player adventure role-playing game.
After all the awards (Game of the Year at The Game Awards! Five BAFTAs!) and more than 15 million copies sold at the time of this writing, the future of Baldur’s Gate is starting to take shape. It just might not look the way you expect.
No. Studio founder Swen Vincke announced as much this March, during a talk at the Game Developers Conference. “We’re not going to make Baldur’s Gate 4, which everybody is expecting us to do,” Vincke said. “We’re going to move on, we’re going to move away from D&D, and we’re going to start making a new thing.”
He expanded on the decision in an interview with IGN, saying that his team had already started preliminary work on more Baldur’s Gate content, but that “the heart wasn’t there. It was more routine work than actually being excited.”
He made the decision to pivot in late 2023, and believes that it was greeted with relief by staff. “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,’” he told IGN.
Larian Studios has released its license to the Baldur’s Gate franchise back to Wizards of the Coast and its parent company, Hasbro, so that another studio can take on the next Baldur’s Gate game.
In the same GDC talk, Vincke also announced that Larian was ceasing work on Baldur’s Gate 3 DLC, with no plans to release any. The Larian team reiterated this in a community update post on April 18.
“Being given the chance to develop a game set in the Dungeons & Dragons universe has been a dream come true for all of us.
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