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Larian Studios will not be involved in any successor or DLC for Baldur’s Gate 3 according to CEO Swen Wicke.
In a conversation with GameSpot, Wicke would chat in detail about the success of the Game of the Year-winning role-playing title but would confirm that the studio’s adventures in Faerûn would be at an end, leaving the intellectual property in Wizards of the Coast’s hands.
He would say the idea of another installment in any fashion is “literally the opposite of what Larian is about. We want to do big, new things. We don’t want to rehash the thing that we’ve done already.”
Larian closes the book on Dungeons and Dragons
Wicke would tell GameSpot that the studio’s next title “is not Baldur’s Gate 4, it’s not Dungeons and Dragons (D&D).”
“Larian has been built for making big things,” Wicke would say. “Ever since we took our destiny in our own hands and left publishers behind our Meta Critic (rating) has been going up.”
He spoke about the organic creative process that Larian had with Wizards of the Coast and how early access allowed the studio to sound out what gamers thought of the content. On the new project, Wicke would say “We know the general direction and where we are going to end up.”
“We knew that when we started Baldur’s Gate, there would be a lot of passion for it,” the CEO would say when asked how he kept the momentum and focus of the team high. “It took six years, we didn’t want it to take six years, but the summation of our problems was blending immersive gameplay and cinematics…it was very complicated, so that delayed it (BG3) then we had Covid, the war in Ukraine, lots of things going wrong, so the sum of all those things added quite a lot of delay.”
“When most of the teams had finished, but not all of them we had to make a decision if we were going to delay it again, as we were competing with Starfield (for the same release slot), the team said fuck no! Excuse my language, we’re not going to go (delay release) any later.”
Wicke will probably let down gamers hoping for a quick successor built in the same engine, as he said “If we could do one (a new project) in four years, we’d be happy,” when asked what the ideal time is to spend on a new project or intellectual property.
When asked about the current gaming climate, Wicke would starkly say “I don’t have a crystal ball, there’s a lot of people losing their jobs and it is really upsetting. We’ve seen this happen before, like in 2009, which was one of our darkest days with the global financial crisis and people were making a lot of derivative work, like 500 versions of My Little Pony, where people were chasing the same thing over and over. I think we will see a lot of opportunities and new studios rise (from the mass layoff environment in the creative world).”
“Wizards of the Coast have seen massive layoffs…there is no one left from the original meeting with them, you share so much knowledge about D&D (Dungeons and Dragons). It’s sad, and I’m not judging anyone, but they are gone, but their knowledge is now out there.”
Larian’s creative fuel
Wicke would wrap the interview by talking about the mentality of Larian and how robust the studio has become due to having “fallback positions. As we have progressed and the studio has been growing, we’ve been increasing these fallback positions, so if something goes wrong I know exactly what we are going to do.”
When asked about the pitfalls that success can bring and what Wicke didn’t want Baldur’s Gate 3’s eventual successor to become he would say “You need to have fuel. We had reserve fuel with the success of Divinity Original Sin and more with the success in early access, but we would have not done that (achieved BG3) if early access wasn’t so successful… you have to have reserves.”
“That’s why when we did take on Baldur’s Gate 3 I knew we would be fine. You know if you are driving across the North Pole in your car you need a dashboard, you need to know how much fuel you have in your car or you’re going to freeze to death. You need to know what you are doing, even in something as messy as game development.”
Fans of Baldur’s Gate 3 will be disappointed, but Wicke and the Larian team have gone from strength to strength since becoming the masters of their own fate. Players will just have to be patient and trust the studio has plenty in the tank to take on their next adventure.
Image: Larian.
