After Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian passed on the opportunity to make a sequel, brand owner Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast went looking for someone else to do it. And, as it turns out, the company already works with some of the leads behind Baldur’s Gate 2.
James Ohlen and Kevin Martens were the two co-lead designers on that game, and they also happen to be leads at Archetype Entertainment, developer of the upcoming Mass Effect-like Exodus, which Wizards of the Coast is publishing. Naturally, the publisher turned to one of them to see about making Baldur’s Gate 4.
“The day [Chris Cox, Hasbro CEO] knew [Larian] weren’t going to do it, he called me. ‘Hey James, what do you think about doing Baldur’s Gate 4?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t, I would fail, and here’s why I would fail,'” James Ohlen told PC Gamer.
The massive success of Baldur’s Gate 3 was both a blessing and a curse for developer Larian. But while everyone expected the studio to make the obvious move and start working on a sequel, the team instead decided to move on to something new rather than keep doing the same thing.
The legacy of what Larian boss Swen Vincke and his team created, however, was enough to scare off anyone willing to follow that up. This is partly what made Ohlen turn it down.
“I wouldn’t want to compete against that,” he went on. “Doing Exodus is hard enough, but having to compete against Baldur’s Gate 3? That would be insanity.”
Technology and engine tools were among the other reasons that pushed Ohlen to pass. Replicating that pipeline would’ve taken “at least half a decade of horror”, and Ohlen even asked if they could license the engine from Larian. Even then, it would’ve been a major challenge.
“Swen’s always going to be the master of building those kinds of things,” Ohlen added. “It’s really hard to take him off that throne, just because of everything – the tools, institutional knowledge, team.”
So who would actually be up to the task? According to the veteran designer, it has to be a team unburdened by that baggage, willing to do their own take. “That was me back in Baldur’s Gate. I was like ‘Everyone else sucks and we’re going to crush it.’ It was us against all the other game studios, we’re going to outdo them,” he recalled.
“And because none of us had built games before, we were all like, ‘We’re going to do everything different.’ And sometimes you need that.”
We recently got treated to an extended demo of Exodus, which offered a deeper look at gameplay, and early details of the sci-fi adventure’s morality system. Fittingly, many on the team are former BioWare developers who are attempting to do something fresh with the classic Mass Effect formula.
