A Baldur’s Gate 3 developer says Larian tried “pushing around ideas for Baldur’s Gate 4,” but they “didn’t excite” anyone.
Speaking to GamesRadar+ at Digital Dragons in Poland earlier this week, Baldur’s Gate 3 narrative director Adam Smith addressed Larian’s attempt at making another Baldur’s Gate game. Just earlier this month, the studio announced it wouldn’t be making Baldur’s Gate 4, so if a new game in the series ever does materialize, it’ll be made by another studio for publisher Wizards of the Coast.
“For us, we didn’t have anything unfinished that we wanted to say, we wanted to move on to other worlds,” Smith said about wrapping up Baldur’s Gate 3. “And we tried, we did start pushing around ideas for Baldur’s Gate 4, and they didn’t excite us, we didn’t have the fire. It feels like it should have been a harder decision than it was, but it wasn’t,” the narrative director continued.
“We came to the realization, ‘do we have that fire?’ And we didn’t, so it was obvious – we don’t do it. And it’s great to work in a place where that’s true, and you’re not told ‘yeah but it’ll earn us this much money so therefore we’re going to do it’. That was never a question,” Smith continued. It’s a sad reality that many studios often don’t have complete autonomy over what they make, and when.
“One of the reasons we made [Baldur’s Gate 3] was because it would be a game that we could say ‘this is a story that we really care about. It’s a setting that we really care about, it’s characters that we really care about’. And we actually think we have something to say with them. And so I think we said it all. And we shouldn’t say there’s nothing else to say, but I don’t think we want to say it,” Smith added.
The Baldur’s Gate 3 narrative director also addressed the scrapped DLC for the huge RPG. Earlier this year, Larian studio head Swen Vincke revealed Larian was looking into DLC for Baldur’s Gate 3, but scrapped it simply because no one on the team was passionate about it. Vincke revealed he even had staff thank him for canceling the DLC after the decision was made.
“The DLC, again we discussed it, but it would have been very different. If it’s just an excuse to play the greatest hits again, and show these characters again,” Smith explained. “I know some people want further endings for them, but for us it was like ‘no, we told the stories we wanted to tell’. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t live in the imagination, but for us we did what we wanted to do, so we’d be forcing ourselves.”