Larian Studios is finished with D&D and Baldur’s Gate 3
Recently speaking at GDC (via PC Gamer), Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke announced that Larian is moving away from developing games in the D&D universe, and won’t be developing DLC for Baldur’s Gate 3 — initially codenamed Project Gustav after Vincke’s dog, who sadly passed away earlier this year.
“We are a company of big ideas. We are not a company that’s made to create DLCs or expansions,” Vincke said. “We tried that actually, a few times. It failed every single time. It’s not our thing. Life is too short. Our ambitions are very large.
“And so like Gustav, Baldur’s Gate will always have a warm spot in our heart. We’ll forever be proud of it but we’re not going to continue in it. We’re not going to make new expansions which everybody is expecting. We’re not going to make Baldur’s Gate 4 which everybody is expecting us to do. We’re going to move on. We’re going to move away from D&D and we’re going to start making a new thing.”
We expect the team will continue to roll out patches and tweaks for Baldur’s Gate 3, but new chunky content for us to explore is off the table. “It’s going to be up to Wizards of the Coast because it’s their IP, to find somebody to take over the torch,” Vincke said. “We did our job and for us it’s time to get a new puppy.”
Back in January, Vincke said that he had already “figured out act one” for Larian’s next game, although any sort of reveal won’t be coming for quite a while. Considering the developer’s history of creating huge worlds filled with myriad possibilities, we don’t expect to find out about Larian’s next game for a good few years yet — although we can now safely assume it’s not set in the Forgotten Realms.
Baldur’s Gate 3 was a huge success for Wizards of the Coast, so it’s likely the company will be pushing for more video games with a similar level of quality. In December, Payday developer Starbreeze announced that it’s working on a AAA co-op D&D game with an expected release window of 2026, while Disney Dreamlight Valley developer Gameloft recently revealed that it is developing an action-RPG set within the Forgotten Realms.
