If, like many, you enjoyed exploring the Forgotten Realms for the Baldur’s Gate 3 achievements, we have some disappointing news for you: Larian Studios was working on a Baldur’s Gate 3 expansion that almost became Baldur’s Gate 4. The developer has since decided to move away from D&D and its incredible Xbox RPG.Larian Studios almost turned a Baldur’s Gate 3 expansion into a full sequelIt’s been a year since Baldur’s Gate 3 kicked up a storm of excitement when it launched on PC and later on for consoles, landing Larian Studios a treasure trove of awards. While the studio has since confirmed that it won’t be developing any expansions or sequels for the D&D game, stepping away from Wizards of the Coast altogether, it appears that its explosive popularity last year did lead to the development of an expansion… and almost Baldur’s Gate 4.In an interview with PC Gamer, Larian CEO Swen Vincke says that following Baldur’s Gate 3’s launch the team decided to work on an expansion, as the main game was received so well, and the engine was already there ready to go. “It’s something that you all would have liked, I think. I’m sure, actually. And we actually went pretty fast, because the production machine was still warm. You could already play stuff. But you played it and you looked and it, and, like, you know, this is OK. I mean, we’ll probably have to redo it 10 times. And do we really want to do this for the next three years?” Vincke said. “Having just done six years of D&D, which is not our own thing, are we really going to spend all this time on this and abandon our own plans? Yeah, maybe not for an add-on, but maybe BG4? That makes a lot of sense. So why don’t we do it for BG4? Oh, yeah, that sounds like a really good idea. Let’s make BG4. All the stuff that we did for this thing, we can just move it in there, people are gonna love it. Go for it.”As we now know, the future of this early Baldur’s Gate 4 concept was doomed, but it’s awesome to know that the developer was already cultivating something. “It very rapidly turned, and I don’t think, as developers, we ever felt better since we took that decision,” Vincke said explaining how the team changed direction with the excitement of moving forwards to something new. “Honestly, you really cannot explain or express it, how liberated we are. So morale is super high, just because we’re doing new stuff again. We’re doing our own thing again, we’re not rehashing, we’re not trying to convert rules from 50 years ago into something new.”Larian Studios is now working on “two very ambitious RPGs,” having opened its seventh studio in Warsaw, Poland earlier this year.
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