Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Is development over for BG3?

i really do hope Larian gets us more content to lvl up our chars.

only lvl 12 is really a big bummer. the story and the power levels/tiers of dnd 5e (lvl 12 is just tier 3) do not coincide well.

at the end of bg 2 (throne of bhaal) i really felt powerful. in bg3 ... not so much. actually not all all. and items do not "compensate" lacking char levels. everybody can use and be powerful with items. to exaggerated a bit (but not too much): given enough powerful items a lvl 1 peasant beats the crap out of a lich or even a demigod.

for me bg3 is unfinished business. my char wants more.

Still in Act 1 so no spoilers, but a high level party could take on an Elder Brain Dragon, CR 22.

This is a HORRIBLE PLAN.

Continuous mods breed REPLAYABILITY, and bring continuous profits and BUILDS THE BRAND. To just MAKE IT and SHAKE IT OFF to do some other project is leaving MILLIONS on the table and walking away.

Total Nonsense.

ABSOLUTELY. And that will be the legacy of this game should it end this way. A game that was 1/4 done, and squandered in the desert to die off.

Larian doesn’t have a history of producing traditional DLC, but Larian is now a much bigger studio than before. They have started pre-production on their next project, but until that is in full production, a lot of their staff would be sitting on their hands, not generating revenue, and burning wages.

I think for that reason alone, there is a chance that we get some sort of DLC before Larian’s next game, but we will see.

If not a traditional expansion, maybe something that uses BG3 assets for a smaller scale project, like the canceled Divinity: Fallen Heroes would be appreciated.

Swen is a tease

https://www.pcgamer.com/baldurs-gate-3-expansion-interview/

The quote there about multiple smaller projects is interesting to me. I would be very surprised if at least one of them didn’t utilize the BG3 license and assets. That’s just a smart, economical way to quickly pull in revenue for less work.

Maybe a separate game that is just one big dungeon crawler? Smaller scope, separate (but parallel) story to BG3, more focused on combat and environmental traversal than story, 30 or so hour campaign. I’d play that. Call it Baldur’s Gate 3: Undercity.

Name something that Swen and Hope have in common.

I dont understand his logic that for a new expansion he needs to increase level cap and that takes time. You can still develop new content and keep level cap at level 12, if that is going to break the game engine.

Baldur's Gate: A trip to Waterdeep

You can, but people don't like to be stuck at the max level for half of the game. Add a significant amount of content, and the percentage of the game players will spend with no more advancement prospects will increase. That's very much undesirable.

Here are several types of possible new content.

- Story extension after the main plot.
The traditional expansion. You keep playing your characters but you need to increase the max level and depending on how the story ends in the original game it might not make sense for the story

- Side story/quest during the main story.
Problem here is that you then earn more XP and are overleveled for the main story

- Additional Options
Not a story expansion but more Origin stories/companions/classes. Here no change with the level cap and XP are required but it might not be what some players want as they still need to play the same story yet again.

Larian seems to like to finish a project and move on (while continuing to support it of course). So, I think the *plan* was to go do something else next, but I suspect the huge response to BG3 and dollar signs in Hasbro's eyes may be altering the calculus here.

I think it's quite likely that they might decide to first take a year to do a BG3 expansion before moving on to whatever's planned to be next.

Given how self-contained the story is and how many major paths there (apparently) are for the end state, I don't really expect a major expansion to happen.

What I would like to see, is smaller DLCs that add additional races and (sub)classes. Would love to be able to play through the game as an Aasimar.

The game engine has nothing to do with it. It’s a design problem, not an engine one.

Progression is an important part of RPGs. If you have a lot of content with no progression, that will turn off a lot of players who want and expect to see their characters being rewarded for completing challenges with new spells and abilities to try out.

You can still have progression without increasing the level cap, just make a different campaign.

Sure, but that wouldn’t be a Tales of the Sword Coast / Theonevof Bhaal style expansion, which is what the article under discussion is about.

I actually said earlier in the thread that I hope that one of these three smaller projects Larian is working on is precisely this.

This obviously tinged by own frustrations with WotC right now - I don't like many of the changes to 6e and I may be projecting here BUT:

the line "So we have to have the freedom to experiment and do our stuff" seems important. I seriously doubt that Larian would have made some of the changes they did - eliminating alignment, changing the racial ability score bonuses -- if Wizards hadn't asked them. It must be frustrating to develop a systems like evil playthrough / good playthough and ASI based character generation and be told that WotC has changed its mind about those features and wants you to change your mind as well. "Oh that hole you dug? Please fill it back in"

In fact the Larian CEO has a trouble keeping to script - he continually uses terms lik evil path even as the official descriptions have some nonesense about characters not being truly evil.

I surprised to find myself saying this but right now I think BG3 has done a better with Faerun lore than WotC right now. The Shar / Selune representations in the game were spot on. Shar is an evil goddess and her followers are evil.

Anyway - not to hijack - I'm indifferent about an expansion. Give Larian it's due, it gave us BG2 levels of content. Baldur's gate is huge and there are lots and lots of side quests. Do I want more? Meh. Not sure.

Despite some serious flaws I'll talk about later, I liked the story and there was some great writing in game. Sorry, not sorry, for noticing this but someone has a talent for double entendre - the bawdy bard songs in chapter 2 song book were well done.

TL;DR. I think I'm done, no DLC for me please.

I hope for a couple expanshions for BG3...BG3 is a huge success, so they should provide at least 1 story DLC.
After BG3 I really hope that Larian will work on other D&D titles such as NWN or Icewind Dale.

When it comes to their next titles I hope they take over Owlcats spot with Paizo