{"id":916400,"date":"2026-06-30T07:12:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T12:12:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/30\/the-co-lead-designer-of-baldurs-gate-2-turned-baldurs-gate-4-down-and-i-dont-blame-him-baldurs-gate-3-is-pretty-much-impossible-to-follow\/"},"modified":"2026-06-30T07:12:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T12:12:12","slug":"the-co-lead-designer-of-baldurs-gate-2-turned-baldurs-gate-4-down-and-i-dont-blame-him-baldurs-gate-3-is-pretty-much-impossible-to-follow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/30\/the-co-lead-designer-of-baldurs-gate-2-turned-baldurs-gate-4-down-and-i-dont-blame-him-baldurs-gate-3-is-pretty-much-impossible-to-follow\/","title":{"rendered":"The Co-Lead Designer of Baldur’s Gate 2 Turned Baldur’s Gate 4 Down and I Don’t Blame Him \u2014 Baldur’s Gate 3 Is Pretty Much Impossible to Follow"},"content":{"rendered":"

Entertainment <\/p>\n

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After Baldur\u2019s Gate 3\u2019s enormous success, Baldur\u2019s Gate 4 feels like an inevitability. That\u2019s how the entertainment industry normally works: if a product everyone loves makes hundreds of millions of dollars, it\u2019s guaranteed a sequel. But I\u2019m not sure that established thinking works when it comes to Baldur\u2019s Gate 4.<\/p>\n

First off, Larian itself moved on from Dungeons & Dragons to make Divinity<\/a>. In an interview with IGN at GDC 2024, CEO Swen Vincke revealed Larian began work on Baldur\u2019s Gate 3 DLC and even gave some thought to a potential Baldur’s Gate 4<\/a> before pivoting away to other projects because the team was “going through the motions.” “You could see the team was doing it because everyone felt like we had to do it, but it wasn\u2019t really coming from the heart, and we\u2019re very much a studio from the heart,” Vincke added. “It\u2019s what gotten us into misery and it\u2019s also been the reasons for our success.”<\/p>\n

Hasbro, which owns Dungeonis & Dragons operator Wizards of the Coast, has since said it intends to make Baldur’s Gate 4<\/a>. But it turns out developers are actually turning the project down, and while that sounds astonishing to hear, it makes perfect sense to me.<\/p>\n

<\/output><\/p>\n

PC Gamer<\/a> spoke with James Ohlen, co-lead designer of Baldur\u2019s Gate 2 and former boss of Hasbro-owned Exodus developer Archetype Entertainment<\/a>, and he revealed that Hasbro asked him to make Baldur\u2019s Gate 4, but he said no. Ohlen told Hasbro boss Chris Cox, who had called him to ask about making Baldur\u2019s Gate 4 as soon as he found out Larian wouldn’t, that he \u201cwould fail.\u201d Why? Because he didn\u2019t think he could compete against Baldur\u2019s Gate 3. \u201cThat would be insanity,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s more nuance to this, and it goes back to the unique way the hugely ambitious Baldur\u2019s Gate 3 was made. Larian, which had years of experience making role-playing games with its own engine via the well-received and successful Divinity: Original Sin games before starting work on Baldur’s Gate 3, put the game into Steam early access for years before its full launch in 2023. That long-running process and the invaluable feedback that came from it helped shape the game,<\/p>\n

But on top of that, the developers at Larian are just amazing at what they do, their writers the best in the business, their quest designers the envy of the video game industry. Baldur\u2019s Gate 3 is a masterpiece but it is also truly unique, with more content than any single player could ever hope to see. Most developers are not in the position to make a game like Baldur\u2019s Gate 3. None, other than perhaps Rockstar, has the time, resources, or the freedom to make the sort of creative decisions that went into Baldur’s Gate 3. Baldur\u2019s Gate 3 is a single-player role-playing game that could last you forever, and truly, there are none in the modern era quite like it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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Every Best Reviewed Game of 2023<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n

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Triple-A developers just don\u2019t build video games this way. They are not set up to, nor are they even able to, make a game in the way Baldur\u2019s Gate 3 was made. Especially now, with development budgets under intense pressure and publishers struggling for sales. Baldur\u2019s Gate 4 feels to me like a game only Larian could make. And as the studio has made perfectly clear, it really isn\u2019t interested at all.<\/p>\n

How do you follow Baldur\u2019s Gate 3, then? Ohlen, clearly, couldn\u2019t see a path forward. He said he\u2019d need to start from scratch, because Larian has walked away from Dungeons & Dragons and taken its engine with it. So, he\u2019d need at least half a decade to build the tech, and there\u2019s no way Larian would agree to licensing out its engine.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s Larian boss Swen Vincke to contend with. He\u2019s the CEO of the company and the majority shareholder, but he\u2019s also the director of Baldur\u2019s Gate 3, which means he is free to make creative decisions \u2014 for better and for worse. Most triple-A studio CEOs do not have such freedom or control.<\/p>\n

“Swen’s always going to be the master of building those kinds of things,\u201d Ohlen said. \u201cIt’s really hard to take him off that throne, just because of everything \u2014 the tools, institutional knowledge, team.”<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

I think Baldur\u2019s Gate 4 goes one of two ways: Hasbro tries to essentially make a bigger and better Baldur\u2019s Gate 3, pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into a sequel that takes years to develop, launches on the next generation of consoles as well as PC, and probably isn\u2019t as good as Baldur\u2019s Gate 3 anyway despite all the creative freedom its developers were promised.<\/p>\n

Or, Hasbro takes a completely different approach. It agrees that it would be insane to compete with Baldur\u2019s Gate 3 so it doesn\u2019t try. Instead, it tasks a developer with making something completely different, something unexpected, something unique to that studio. Something smaller scale, maybe cheaper, maybe quicker. Perhaps this would be more of a risk. Perhaps it wouldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Or maybe there’s a third option \u2014 and the more I think about this problem, the more I come around to this as a solution \u2014 we just give up on Baldur\u2019s Gate 4 entirely. Does Baldur\u2019s Gate 3 even need a sequel? I\u2019m not sure it does. I\u2019m not sure it needs a TV adaptation that continues the story<\/a>, either. Perhaps Hasbro would be better off doing to Baldur\u2019s Gate what Larian is doing to Divinity and make a soft reboot. Baldur\u2019s Gate 4 will face extremely tough comparisons with Baldur\u2019s Gate 3. I\u2019m not saying a Baldur\u2019s Gate reboot wouldn\u2019t, but it would perhaps take the pressure off, ever so slightly.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at we*************<\/span>@*<\/span>gn.com<\/span> or confidentially at wy****<\/span>@****<\/span>on.me<\/span>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/section>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Wesley Yin-Poole<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After Baldur\u2019s Gate 3\u2019s enormous success, Baldur\u2019s Gate 4 feels like an inevitability. That\u2019s how the entertainment industry normally works: if a product everyone loves makes hundreds of millions of dollars, it\u2019s guaranteed a sequel. But I\u2019m not sure that established thinking works when it comes to Baldur\u2019s Gate 4. First off, Larian itself moved<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":916401,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32576,150673,1798],"tags":[14860,150672],"class_list":["post-916400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-baldurs","category-co-lead","category-entertainment","tag-baldurs","tag-co-lead"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=916400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/916401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=916400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=916400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=916400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}