Larian Started Work on Baldur's Gate 3 DLC, Then Canceled It: 'The Studio Was Elated'

ign.com:

During a talk at GDC 2024, Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke announced that Larian Studios would not be making any DLC, expansions or sequels for the highly-regarded RPG, which took home another Game of the Year award at Wednesday's Game Developers Choice Awards. However, speaking with IGN, Vincke did say that Larian began work on DLC and even gave some thought to a potential Baldur's Gate 4 before pivoting away to other projects.

"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," Vincke says. "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."

Vincke has spoken before about the challenges about working with 5th Edition, particularly when it comes to how powerful players get when they reach Level 12 and beyond. Shortly after release, Larian Studios said that the team wanted to do new content but didn't know what yet. To date, Larian Studios has mostly focused on adding content that wasn't available at release, such as a new epilogue and additional endings.

When it came time to make DLC, though, Vincke says Larian was going through the motions. "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."

Vincke says that he took a vacation over the Christmas holidays, and when he returned his mind was made up. '[I] came back and I told the team, ‘You know we’re not going to do it. We’re going to shift around and we’re going to start doing these