Wow! Larian Studios stunned the crowd during a Thursday Game Developers Conference panel discussion. Founder and CEO Swen Vincke revealed that the studio has no interest in expanding upon its massively popular Baldur’s Gate 3 RPG. He clarified that fans shouldn’t get their hopes up for any DLC, expansions, or a Baldur’s Gate 4.
The revelation was shocking, noted IGN. The studio has been tightlipped about numbers, but Baldur’s Gate 3 sales estimates range from 7.5 million copies sold to over 20 million, depending on who you ask. The low-range ballpark seems unrealistic, considering the game is available on all major gaming platforms except the Switch. Furthermore, as of last August, it had sold more than 5.2 million units on Steam alone. The overall consensus is a vague “way over 10 million.”
Regardless of actual counts, few would deny the game’s popularity. Fewer still would have thought Larian would abandon the opportunity to milk more revenue from this potential cash cow. Its developers did provide some post-launch content, including a playable epilogue. Many were confident there was more to come, especially a sequel.
However, Larian did give us hints this would happen. During Gamescom 2023, Senior Product Manager Tom Butler told IGN that the studio would continue with patches for the time being but mentioned a holiday and moving on to something else in the same breath.
“We’ll carry on patching for a while and then we’re all going to take a holiday and then we’ll figure out what we do next,” Butler explained. “But at the moment, we genuinely have discussions. We want to do more. We don’t know what yet.”
Baldur’s Gate 3 is already a massive game. The physical version comes on four discs. In my opinion, it’s one of the first titles in a long while that I would consider complete at launch – aside from some bugs. It fully has enough content not to warrant the continuous expansion many gamers expect.
Furthermore, Larian said that it is working on a cross-platform modding system it hopes to implement before it parts ways. As we have seen with games like Skyrim and Fallout 4, community-created mods can sometimes rival a studio’s own DLC efforts – Fallout: London anyone? So, BG3 will likely have many years of community-supported material in its future.
As for what’s next, the studio is best known for its Divinity RPG franchise. Launched in 2002 with the game Divine Divinity, its latest entries, Divinity: Original Sin (2014) and Divinity: Original Sin II (2017), were very well received. Both earned spots on our ongoing “The Best PC Games (You Should Be Playing)” list, so check them out if you haven’t already. Judging by the developer’s release cadence, we should be about due for another Divinity game, but who knows?