Larian Studios canceled DLC plans for Baldur’s Gate 3, to the relief of the dev team

While the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 has been enormous, the developers at Larian Studios have admitted to being exhausted now that the game is out on the market. After three years of Early Access, what came before, and their current support of the title through patches and updates, the Belgian studio has announced that they’re parting from the license, confirming that they won’t make any expansions for the game, nor a sequel. However, CEO of the studio and director of the game Swen Vincke confessed that they did once plan for an expansion, although they ended up canceling it to the relief of his team.

“Because of all the success the obvious thing would have been to do a DLC, so we started on one,” said Vincke in an interview with IGN. “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.”

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“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. 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 other things that we talked about, that we planned on doing before we started on BG3.’ Those were always the plans for afterward, we have two games that we want to make, and we have lots of concepts. So let’s just have closure on BG3, it’s been great. We’ve done our job. It’s a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. So let’s pass the torch to another studio to pick up this incredible legacy.”

“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’,” admitted Vincke.

The next step for Larian Studios

After having overcome the pressure of working with a legendary license for RPG fans, Larian is taking a step forward and everything indicates that they will continue creating their own properties. After surprising everyone with Divinity: Original Sin and consecrating themselves to the classic RPG with their sequel, the studio seemed the most appropriate to bring back Baldur’s Gate, whose first two installments were brought to life by Bioware. Everything indicates that they will not abandon the formula that has made them a huge name in the industry, although this time in the form of a new IP.