Larian Studios recently shocked fans when it confirmed it would not make any DLC for Baldur’s Gate 3 or a sequel to the incredibly popular role-playing game. What the studio’s next game is remains a mystery, and Larian CEO Swen Vincke has now teased more about it.
Speaking to IGN, Vincke said he can’t say more about the game now, but that it “will have its proper moment.” Whatever the game is, it might not be what you expect, he said.
“Hopefully nobody’s going to leak it for us, but it’s different than what you think it is, but it is still familiar enough for you to recognize that it’s something that we are making,” he said.
Given the critical and apparent success of Baldur’s Gate 3, expectations are high for Larian’s next game. As of January this year, Vincke said he’d already figured out Act 1 of the new game.
Regarding the decision to move on from Baldur’s Gate for the studio’s next game, Vincke said it wasn’t easy to translate the Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition into a video game in the first place. Vincke said the team had “all these ideas of new combat” that it wanted to try in the D&D setting but “they were not compatible.” So the decision was made to move on from Baldur’s Gate.
“So I went on a holiday for Christmas and I came back and I said to the team, ‘You know what? We’re just not going to do it. We’re going to shift around and we’re just going to start doing these other things that we talked about that we were going to do, that we actually planned on doing before we started on BG III,'” he said.
The studio was “elated” when Vincke made this announcement, he said. The executive said he anticipated that employees would be angry, but they weren’t.
While Larian is not going to make another Baldur’s Gate game right now, Vincke alluded to how another team could step in and do it. “Let’s end it here on a high and just pass the torch to the next developer to pick up what is an incredible legacy,” he said.
Beyond whatever Larian’s next game is, the studio is already thinking about the games to come after that, including an RPG that “dwarfs” Baldur’s Gate 3.