Swen Vincke, the founder of Larian Studios, which developed last year’s Game of the Year winner Baldur’s Gate 3, said at this year’s Game Developers Conference that the studio was moving on from the Baldur’s Gate series.
According to a report by IGN, Vincke confirmed that the studio would not be making any DLC for Baldur’s Gate 3, and would not be moving forward to Baldur’s Gate 4. Larian will instead be moving away from the Dungeons & Dragons IP to pursue something new, and will leave future D&D games in the hands of Wizards of the Coast.
This move is surprising given the massive critical and commercial success of Baldur’s Gate 3; though Larian has added various content patches to the game, there has been no proper DLC to capitalize on its popularity. Larian Studios provided an excerpt of Vincke’s talk to Kotaku to confirm and explain the decision.
“I told you at the beginning that we were a company of big ideas,” he said. “We are not a company that’s made to create DLCs [or] expansions. We tried that actually, a few times, and it failed every single time. It’s not our thing. Life is too short, our ambitions are very large.”
He stated that Baldur’s Gate would always have a special place in the team’s hearts, but they were ready to move on from it. He then confirmed that they would not be working in the world of D&D going forward.
“We’re not going to make new expansions, which everybody is expecting us to do,” he said. “We’re not going to make Baldur’s Gate 4, which everybody is expecting us to do. 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.”
“I’m saying it here because I have a forum and [we’re getting] bombarded by people that expect us to do these things, but that’s not for us,” he continued. “It’s going to be up to Wizards of the Coast, because it’s their IP, to find somebody to take over the torch.”