Following the success of Baldur’s Gate 3, Hasbro has made it quite clear that it wants a Baldur’s Gate 4. Wizard of the Coast president John Hight said in an interview last year that a follow-up is “of course” going to happen, but when?
The reality is that Larian Studios is not going to make Baldur’s Gate 4. The studio has parted ways with Hasbro, ditching DLC ideas to focus entirely on its upcoming Divinity RPG, which has been described as “Larian unleashed”.
In a surprising reveal, Baldur’s Gate 2 c-lead designers James Ohlen and Kevin Martens, who are currently working on the upcoming RPG Exodus for Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro, were asked to make Baldur’s Gate 4. However, they don’t want to follow in the enormous footsteps of Larian.
“The day [Chris Cox, Hasbro CEO] knew they weren’t going to do it, he called me,” Ohlen told PC Gamer. “’Hey James, what do you think about doing Baldur’s Gate 4?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t, I would fail, and here’s why I would fail.’”
Ohlen told the Hasbro CEO that Baldur’s Gate 3 succeeded not just because of Larian’s strong design, but also because the team was perfectly suited to make that game. After all, any Larian fan can tell, BG3 is the culmination of decades of design iteration from that studio, all wrapped within a brilliant D&D adaptation.
“I wouldn’t want to compete against that,” he told the outlet. “Doing Exodus is hard enough, but having to compete against Baldur’s Gate 3? That would be insanity.”
Additionally, as Larian and Hasbro’s relationship has broken down, Baldur’s Gate 4 likely won’t be built on Larian’s own in-house Divinity Engine. While a game like BG3 could be made in something like Unreal, which Ohlen’s team is using for Exodus, it would be far easier to just use the existing engine BG3 was made in. If the team was to try and build the tools needed to facilitate a Baldur’s Gate 4? Well, Ohlen explains they would need “at least half a decade of horror, building all that stuff”.
Ohlen concedes that Larian CEO and Baldur’s Gate 3 lead Swen Vincke will “always be the master of building those kinds of things”, adding “it’s really hard to take him off that throne”. However, he also admits that the best team to pick for someone to make Baldur’s Gate 4 is a team that doesn’t adhere too closely to what Larian did. After all, Larian didn’t design BG3 with a dogmatic follow-up to the rules of BG1 and BG2.
Right now, there’s no official word on Baldur’s Gate 4, but a sequel is in the works… in the form of a TV show. Headed up by Chernobyl and The Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin, the upcoming HBO sequel series will include some of the game’s actors, but they may not play their existing characters.
