While Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast are adamant that Baldur’s Gate 4 is happening, Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios will not be the ones behind the potential future sequel.
Instead, the studio is working on a new reboot of its long-running Divinity series which CEO Swen Vincke claims will be “Larian unleashed”. Continuing its turn-based trend with new engine upgrades and the same early access release structure as before, the upcoming RPG has certainly caught gamers’ attention.
In an interview with GamesHub, former GTA technical director Obbe Vermeij praised Larian for being bold enough to leave its biggest success behind. Vermeij, who worked at Rockstar as it was becoming the GTA studio instead of a varied production house, explained that Larian’s decision is bold but very risky.
“It’s quite cool to see like Larian Studios who just did Baldur’s Gate 3 and they’ve said, ‘We don’t feel like Baldur’s Gate 4. We’re just gonna do another game,’” the former technical director said.
“Good for them. But it’s a bold move. It’s not obvious. It’s very risky. It’s easier to just keep on doing what you’re doing.”
Vermeij explained that Rockstar’s decision to focus almost entirely on Grand Theft Auto after the success of the third game as that’s what made sense. Ideas for new games would largely just be kept aside for the next GTA title such as stealth gameplay from Agent in GTA V.
“The reality is if you have a studio that has one mega successful game, it just doesn’t make sense to do any wild changes,” Obbe Vermeij, he said. “Whatever weird ideas you have, we really should put them into GTA rather than just launching an entirely new game.” After all, why make a new open world zombie game when you can add those ideas to your already successful cowboy title?
The developer explained that Rockstar has experimented a lot on other titles and ideas. Unfortunately, the reality is that those games simply won’t sell the same as Grand Theft Auto and probably won’t be as good.
They wouldn’t have been as good as GTA. They would have been a waste of time and a distraction,” the developer said of Rockstar’s “other experiments”.
It also doesn’t help that the gaming audience is less forgiving of a swing and miss release nowadays. Bethesda Game Studios escaped its Elder Scrolls and Fallout loop to create Starfield, a game that I thoroughly respect despite its issues, but that title not being a critical darling has led to a common consensus that The Elder Scrolls 6 will be bad despite the two series having different gameplay loops.
As for Larian, little is known about the upcoming Divinity game, but the studio has earned the good will of its fanbase after years of post-launch support of Baldur’s Gate 3. While it is sad to see the studio leave the series behind, the studio’s past work on its in-house Divinity series was equally as fantastic. (Well, at least when the Original Sin games are concerned.)
