I’ll admit, when the announcement came last week, I was angry and it took me a few days to cool down.
See, Baldur’s Gate helped me get through a particularly tough point in my life, something I’m still healing from, and I realize now that the hope of an expansion or continuation of the story was really keeping me going more than I’d expected. I’ll get over it of course, but right now? I’m just sad.
I think the way in which we got the news of the cancellation was poor. Swen’s immediate pivot to the next new exciting project, along with the IGN article confirming that an expansion had been started but canceled, left me feeling like Larian really didn’t care about the feelings of the fans who wanted a continuation. A company like Fromsoft would have made those announcements over several days / weeks, taking the time to lessen the blow by showing empathy / understanding that this was going to be disappointing news. The last thing I wanted to be told was how great this next new thing is going to be and how it’s going to blow my previous experience out of the water. It’s a bit tone deaf. Frankly, hearing about how the studio was supposedly elated at the decision to abandon something I loved also sucks!
I hope some lessons can be learned on how to better handle PR in the future.
All of this is on you, not Larian.
