Strike while the iron is hot and announce that a sequel is on the way! hehe
I swooped BG1 off the shelf at Fry's electronics in the summer of 1998. Tales of the Sword Coast was out by 1999 and the BG2 was out within 2 years Fall of 2000. Part of the staying power came from knowing that the adventure would continue and that your characters could be brought over. There were other games that released in the interim period, Planescape and Icewind Dale that helped to maintain momentum, but BG1 and BG2 together inside of a 5 years is what made "Baldur's Gate" such a thing.
BG3 can do much the same I think, even if they detour a bit to relax with a DOS3 or whatever. I think they should announce it as a plan or at least express a desire to take us all the way there. What they have going already here in BG3 is a really nice introduction to D&D and the Forgotten Realms campaign setting. Faerun is a big draw. I think the strong sales are at least in part because of the setting. I know for myself I just have way more attachment to this material than I do for similar stuff set in other IPs.
So yeah, BG4 seems like a no brainer! Or an elder brainer, whatever works hehe.
I think in a follow up, they should make it more class focused. Similar to BG2 where each companion/class got a stronghold and related class themed quest that threaded into the main plot. They should do something like that for BG4, and delve deep to round out whatever missing content we'd want for a full treatment, like the old class handbooks. Similarly with fantasy race, Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Halflings etc to build out some more there and just add that on top of what they've built here. Taking it to another corner of Faerun and showing us how that looks these days. We also need one of those massive dungeon crawler arenas like Durlag's or Watcher's to really ice it.
Even if they don't want to do an expansion per say, I think Baldur's Gate 3: "Insert Class campaign subtitle" could work well. Cause then they could have it broken up into more manageable treatments. Something like BG3: "the Complete (Ranger's, Wizard's, Clerics etc) Handbook" or "BG3: Volo's guide to... (Thay, Cormyr, Waterdeep)" somewhere we haven't been in a while or "BG3: Dwarves, Gnomes and Halflings" things like that. A BG3: "Book of Artifacts" would also be cool. You know like a self contained campaign all about Baba Yaga's Hut or the Dragons Orbs or something like that. The upside to doing that is that they could create more content keying off the lvl 1-12 campaigns. Reaching lvl 13 would be enough of a draw I think, cause then BG4 could take you from lvl 10-20, or you could start slightly over-levelled at 12-13 on a higher difficulty setting. This would give them ways to build it out and keep it humming while they create the systems or story hooks that'd be needed for a higher lvl campaign. After hitting lvl 20, I think they should do it where you build out followers or progress via itemization through powerful artifacts, stuff like that, rather than reinventing D&D to create stuff at the epic lvls.
Last edited by Black_Elk; 20/08/23 07:18 PM.
