Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Not BG4 or D&D

I'm glad they've decided to move on from BG3 and DnD and hope they stick to that decision. It always felt like they had to wrestle a lot with 5e's ruleset to make a game they deem fun. I'm curious to see what they do next.

"Thanks - Gustav for ... being Gustav"

I get choked up every single time on that.

So much respect and love and endless gratitude, truly.

It was an absolutely wild ride and a total trip!

Fly on red dragon, fly on. We'll catch ya on the next out hehe

Well fuck, they really don't care.
Won't see me EA testing their next game though. This whole experience left such a bitter taste.

So basically Larian cut and runs after delivering a disjointed mess thanks to their constant rewrites and cuts to the final act instead of trying to fix their mess, trusting that the shippers will be enough to finance their next game.

Well, I'd have liked more of a similar game, but it's hard to see how a full expansion would have worked. Extra missions in the middle would feel like you're being diverted away from the urgent issue of the Absolute, and there are so many potential storylines at the end from all of the different companions it's hard to know which you'd follow. And a new, bigger threat would cheapen the victory of the original game.

I'll keep an eye out for whatever they release next since I really enjoyed BG3, but I don't see any reason to buy early access. I'd rather wait for the finished game and experience the whole thing, rather than getting bits of the plot in advance, which is how I imagine early access worked in BG3

Is an absolute sorrow. Regarding the expansion, I'm sorry they don't make a continuation to get to level 20. I am increasingly convinced that the multiplicity of intricate and convoluted endings from being able to play as a custom character an Origin character.

As for a BG4, it is too early to tell. Probably another SH will do it.

I posted this in the other thread this article was linked.

This is good for Larian, good for the BG franchise, good for D&D, and good for me personally. This is the best news I've heard involving Larian since BG3 was announced. I'm actually finding myself curious and interested in what those two new projects Swen talks about may be. I hope at least one of them turns out to be a Larian game I will like, finally!

I wonder, how can you tell people in detail about the severe problems you faced during development that lead to the release of a playable but unfinished game after 6 years and in the same interview use the Larian philosophy of not rehashing on previous successes as an excuse to leave it like that? And how can you be so confident now to move on to a project that will "dwarf" BG3?

This makes no sense whatsoever, but Swen makes it sound as if it was totally reasonable.

Well, I'm no fan of Divinity. That's the most frustrating game I've ever played.
I've uninstalled both BG3 & Divinity.
They're no worth messing with.

Whow.

The negativity of some posters really give the impression as if BG3 would have been a failure.

Which of course it wasnt at all.


And no, the next game of Larian wont be D&D, since its SF.

Well ... technically SF can be D&D, too. Knights of the Old Republic for example was d20, which is basically a simplified D&D3. IMHO a great basis for making your own rulesystem, by the way. Despite being quite extremely trivialistic compared to pretty much any other rulesystem I've experienced, KotOR was quite fun to play.

But I dont think Larian will go that way.


I havent really paid attention much to game news, so maybe I've missed it. But I'm not aware that Larian ever said "we will never do another D&D game" or "we wont ever do BG4". They just didnt say the opposite, either. As far as I know, they keep their options open, and I dont see anything wrong about that.



P.s.: GNA I love this forum. I could have sworn I clicked the first page before answering this thread. Turns out I didnt. The forum REALLY wants you to only see the end of the thread. Grr.


P.p.s.: But even after seeing the link, I still would say this isnt a final commitment. They may do BG4 after all. Just not as their next game. And that we already knew before.




But we've already known no expansion will happen ? They will work on a definite version and thats it.

I think the constraints imposed by DnD 5e were good for Larian. I bounced hard off of DoS 2 because of the armor implementation and the level scaling gear. BG3 on the other hand had a much smoother gear progression that allowed some gear obtained in the first act to be used for the entire game.

So... I would personally prefer that they make a BG4 or a DLC. However, I never expected them too. I can't remember sources for this, but I recall Sven saying that Larian doesn't do DLC during early access.

In any case, I don't think that they are saying that they would NEVER do BG4, just not next. As implied earlier in this thread, the chaos at Hasbro probably helped them reach this decision (although Sven is too diplomatic to say that outright). Hopefully the project after the next.

How could anyone have know it's not happening, when Swen himself entertained the idea of creating a dlc for a while as he stated in the interview?

And how do we know they will work on a DE when they are "done with bg3" (except for patches and bugfixes, again according to the interview)?

I think the thread title can be expanded to "No DE, DLC, BG4 or DND".

Hot take: What if Larian decided to focus more on the romance/companion aspects of the game because they never really felt like working with the ruleset will get the best they could offer? Like I know companions were a big thing in BG1 and 2, but still to me BG3 is more of a companion simulator rather than a story driven game. Still, could only be they wanted to transport the tabletop feeling with friends interacting with you into the game more than just acting as a DM.

Either way, Larian decided against a DLC and money, they wanted to move on, wanted to do something by heart and maybe therein lies the explanation why act 3 is worse compared to the act 1. Either it was just a time issue or they never really poured in their heart and soul.

No surprise there. Hopefully, there are still some patches in the works.

I am looking forward to next Larian projects.

The fact the studio was “elated” when he told them they are done with BG3 goes a long way to explaining why Act 3 is such a mess. People don’t suddenly burn out, sounds like the enthusiasm for the project drained away quite a while ago.

Even if what they come up with next sounds appealing I’m going to promise myself to swerve EA if they offer one. Not going down that road ever again.

Obviously a D:OS 3 will be a hard-pass for me. But since Swen mentioned two games they have been wanting to make, I'm hopeful the 'other' game--so *not* anything associated with their Divinity franchise--will be something exciting for me. He also mentions that he and his devs have had many new ideas about how to do combat, which they could not try in BG3 because of D&D mechanics limitations. This also intrigues me greatly. Maybe they have some ideas to make TB combat something *not* as crappy as it is currently, something that is actually both fun and realistic. Or even maybe a way to bridge the gap between TB and RT(wP). That would be especially awesome.

I feel sorry for Larian if they burned out during development and I'm afraid, the obsessive fandom played a role in that, but in the end, here we are, fans, hoping for a finished game, a polished game and I really hope they are still motivated to bring the game to a successful end, namely adding at least a bit of the feedback fans gave within the last months and fixing the bugs.
To some degree fans also burned out I feel, they gave their thoughts in EA, wrote tons of feedback and there hasn't been a real statement for months. Same people still hope today that their work wasn't in vain.

And yeah, I also very strongly agree that a huge part of Swen's decision to pivot away from not just BG but D&D entirely is because his interractions with WotC and Hasbro proved to be unpleasant and left him with a bad taste. Any developer that works with WotC walks away having hated their experience. That's WotC's record, especially in recent years.

RIP D&D video games.

I think @Tuco and @Ranxerox nailed it.

The Larian CEO has never liked DnD and always wanted to make DoS3. At first they tried to make BG3 as DoS-like as possible and got frustrated when DnD fans pushed back.

As far as staff being elated it seems cleathat the CEO tends to confuse his staff's reactions with his own. I've worked for bosses like and it was a pretty awful experience. After a while you start to lose your sense of self because you spend all of your time sharing your boss' fears, anxieties and moments of elation.

As the CEO said:

"There are a lot of constraints on making D&D, and 5th Edition is not an easy system to put into a video game. We had all these ideas of new combat we wanted to try out and they were not compatible."

Act 3 is a mess and it's the most Larian of the chapters. Explosions, barrels, everyone-hates-the-gods, undead as comic relief. It's the chapter that wanted to be Larian game but was forced to be DnD game.

So, sure, I will probably buy DoS3 once it has definitive edition and is on sale.

This is yet another signal that the end game will not be improved and that's a disappointment but, on balance, this is good news.

Hopefully BG4 will be made by a company that likes DnD.

I might be missing a point here, but if I don't like DnD, why do I even try to pitch for the IP?
Sure they didn't think they could just make a DOS-BG3 and come away with it. If it was for the popularity and the money, alright, but if so, then they sold themselves and their believes - or at least the CEO did so.
If that's the case, it's pretty heartless to hype so many DnD and BG fans while not sharing that hype at all.

In retrospect, they should have used the characters (or similar characters) and come up with either a new DOS or a new IP.