Baldur’s Gate 3’s director was once on board with doing a sequel, but now he’s aiming for “a very big RPG that will rule them all”

So, Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian isn’t doing any DLC for the game, or a Baldur’s Gate 4, or anything to do with D&D in the near future. It’s ok, stop crying. As it turns out, CEO Swen Vincke was once on board with some of those ideas, but now he’s got his eyes on creating “a very big RPG that will rule them all”, well, as soon as the tech it’ll need is actually a thing.

Yup, the thing you were salivating over isn’t going to be a thing, but it’s ok, there’s a new thing vaguely floating on the horizon for you to salivate over, praise be. To be fair, having just grabbed yet more hardware during the GDC awards, Larian’s earned a chance to pursue its interesting pipe dreams and mysterious ideas, though that seemingly wasn’t always the plan.

Speaking to GameSpot, Vincke’s given a bit more context to yesterday’s big announcement, and how Larian arrived at the point where it was so sure that it wasn’t in the making DLC for and following up on one big success kind of studio. “When it came to BG3, everybody was telling me ‘you gotta make DLC’, you’ve gotta make DLC, and really you should be starting on a sequel,” Vincke recalled, adding that, as you’d expect, this was powered by the game’s success and money-making ability.

“So, for a while I was actually saying ‘yeah, yeah, that’s what we should be doing, we should change our plans and we should be doing that’, the team said ‘yeah, we should be doing that’”, he continued. According to an interview with IGN, things got as far as starting to actually work on a DLC for Baldur’s Gate 3. “Then, later in the year,” Vincke says in the Gamespot interview, “I realised that’s not what we’re made for, I mean, that’s literally the opposite of what Larian is about, we want to do big new things, we don’t want to rehash the things that we’ve done already.”

So, having cancelled the DLC, the studio’s back on the plan of doing a new thing, which Vincke says will be followed by another new thing, with the latter being what he calls “a very big RPG that will rule them all”. Being just as vague as he was when he seemingly teased Larian’s immediate next game earlier this year, all he really said about this big RPG is that it’ll require some technological advancements.

“I think that there’s some tech that we don’t have yet, and I hope, I don’t know what the specs are gonna be in the next [generation of hardware], I hope we’re going to get something that’s gonna bring us closer [to that]” he said.

Ooh Swen, you man of mystery. I could almost forgive you for totally abandoning poll etiquette the other day. But I won’t. Not yet.

If you’re planning on replaying Baldur’s Gate 3 while you cry about not getting any DLC for it, first of all that’s pretty depressing, and second, you should check out what Vincke’s said about the original plans for the game narrator-wise, which included Matt Mercer.