Baldur’s Gate 3’s programmer was dealing with DLC, and afterwards ditched it since it really felt much more necessary than a real enthusiasm.
At a current Game Developer’s Conference talk offered by Baldur’s Gate 3 supervisor Swen Vincke, the programmer discussed the future of Baldur’s Gate 3. While to start with disclosing that Baldur’s Gate 4 isn’t on the cards, since Larian is made with the franchise business after Baldur’s Gate 3, Vincke exposed that DLC was originally in growth for the most up to date game in the collection as lately as December 2023.
“You could see the team was doing it because everyone felt like we had to do it, but it wasn’t really coming from the heart, and we’re very much a studio from the heart. It’s what gotten us into misery and it’s also been the reasons for our success,” Vincke claimed in his GDC talk (many thanks, IGN). Vincke and Larian paused over the Christmas duration, and when the supervisor went back to function, he revealed the modification in strategy.
“[I] came back and I told the team, ‘You know we’re not going to do it. We’re going to shift around and we’re going to start doing these other things that we talked about, that we planned on doing before we started on BG3,'” the Baldur’s Gate 3 supervisor exposed. “Those were always the plans for afterward, we have two games that we want to make, and we have lots of concepts. So let’s just have closure on BG3, it’s been great. We’ve done our job. It’s a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. So let’s pass the torch to another studio to pick up this incredible legacy.”
Along that line, Vincke likewise exposed somewhere else in his talk that the future of the Baldur’s Gate games are totally as much as author Wizards of the Coast. Larian is a business of “big ideas,” he included, and not the type of business that’s tailored to take on jobs like growths or DLC. To be reasonable to Vincke, when you check out Baldur’s Gate 3 as it is, it’s currently a huge game, loaded with near-endless branching tale courses and results.
Returning to the issue of the ditched DLC, Vincke claimed he believed the personnel at Larian would certainly be upset with him, since he merely could not muster up the power needed to make the DLC. “I saw so many elated faces, which I didn’t expect, and I could tell they shared the same feelings, so we were all aligned with one another. And I’ve had so many developers come to me after and say, ‘Thank god,'” Vincke better included.
“I’m always the one where it starts with the initial idea and then I give it to the team and they start iterating it and they turn it into something much better. During BG3 I pitched to them what the next game would be…If I see they’re excited, I’ll say, ‘Okay let’s do that.’ If they’re not, it’s back to the drawing board,” Vincke included. “So they were very excited about a couple of the things we were planning on doing. Then the pivot to start doing BG3 DLC was expected because it’s what you do…We didn’t have any antagonism against BG4 or DLC, but the heart wasn’t there. It was more routine work than actually being excited. Now we have the excitement back in the room and that’s a big important thing.”
