Baldur’s Gate 4 appears to have developers running scared because they’re worried about meeting expectations set by Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3. But one developer has said they would consider making the game a “great challenge” — although they’d avoid simply replicating what had gone before.
After Larian decided against making Baldur’s Gate 4 and left Dungeons & Dragons behind to work on Divinity, fans have wondered which studio might be capable of taking on perhaps the toughest sequel in all video games. Among the studios that are often mentioned in online debates about who to turn to is Owlcat Games.
Owlcat is the developer of a number of well-received role-playing games including cRPG Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, which was compared to Baldur’s Gate 3 upon its 2023 release. Rogue Trader is considered one of the best Warhammer 40,000 video games ever made, with fantastic characters, a gripping story, and over 100 hours of content — just like Baldur’s Gate 3.
While it didn’t quite reach the heights of Baldur’s Gate 3, Rogue Trader did well enough for Owlcat to secure a follow-up, Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy, which has many fans not just of Games Workshop’s grimdark setting on high alert, but cRPG fans rubbing their hands in anticipation.
So, would Owlcat answer the call, if Hasbro were to pick up the phone and ask it to make Baldur’s Gate 4? That’s the question I put to co-founder and creative director Alexander Mishulin, and… well, he didn’t say no!
“First of all, I would like to thank all the players, all your audience that consider us to be able to do that,” he began, diplomatically. “It’s a really great honor. You already said that we are a little bit masochistic. So yeah, we will consider it a great challenge!”
Indeed I had said Owlcat was masochistic — for taking on the challenge of making Warhammer 40,000 games and a The Expanse game (we’ve got an exclusive reveal on The Expanse right here), as part of a wide-ranging interview in which we discuss Owlcat’s enormous growth over the last decade. The Warhammer 40,000 and The Expanse universes each has a hardcore fanbase that puts any adaptation under intense scrutiny, but Owlcat is very much up for meeting player expectations, which is why Baldur’s Gate 4 might be a great fit.
It’s worth noting that Mishulin is not confirming anything here, but understands what taking on Baldur’s Gate 4 would involve, and the challenge Owlcat would face were matching the standards set by its predecessor. But, he suggests, that’s fine, because any developer simply trying to replicate a Larian game would be doomed to fail.
“In my opinion, Larian has made their own vision of how a sequel to Baldurs’s Gate should be, and they presented it to us. Any other studio that will be doing BG4 will be doing their own game in the Baldurs’ Gate setting,” he explained. “It will not be Larian’s BG3, because BG3 is very Larian formula, with all their ideas for combat and how they mix with Dungeons & Dragons, with their idea of the co-op experience and how it plays into the Dungeons & Dragons experience. So any studio that would be trying to replicate that is bound to fail. It’s just not the way it works. Larian were making such games for 20 years, 30 years right now, starting from the first Divinity. It’s their view of the games, it’s their view of RPGs, and it’s a great game.
“But other studios will do something differently. They will have their own DNA, their own ideas, and they will pour them into Baldur’s Gate 4, and it will be something else. I hope that there will be a studio brave enough and passionate enough and skillful enough to do that game.”
Like Owlcat?
“Thank you!” Mishulin replied, with a smile.
Hasbro, which owns Dungeons & Dragons operator Wizards of the Coast, has insisted it intends to make Baldur’s Gate 4 eventually. But it turns out developers are actually turning the project down.
PC Gamer recently spoke with James Ohlen, co-lead designer of Baldur’s Gate 2 and former boss of Hasbro-owned Exodus developer Archetype Entertainment, and he revealed that Hasbro had asked him to make Baldur’s Gate 4, but he said no. Ohlen told Hasbro boss Chris Cox, who had called him to ask about making Baldur’s Gate 4 as soon as he found out Larian wouldn’t, that he “would fail.” Why? Because he didn’t think he could compete against Baldur’s Gate 3. “That would be insanity,” he said.
Larian, which had years of experience making role-playing games with its own engine via the well-received and successful Divinity: Original Sin games before starting work on Baldur’s Gate 3, put the game into Steam early access for years before its full launch in 2023. That long-running process and the invaluable feedback that came from it helped shape the game. But on top of that, the developers at Larian are just amazing at what they do, their writers are the best in the business, their quest designers the envy of the video game industry. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a masterpiece but it is also truly unique, with more content than any single player could ever hope to see. Most developers are not in the position to make a game like Baldur’s Gate 3. None, other than perhaps Rockstar, has the time, resources, or the freedom to make the sort of creative decisions that went into Baldur’s Gate 3. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a single-player role-playing game that could last you forever, and truly, there are none in the modern era quite like it.
How do you follow Baldur’s Gate 3, then? Ohlen, clearly, couldn’t see a path forward. He said he’d need to start from scratch, because Larian has walked away from Dungeons & Dragons and taken its engine with it. So, he’d need at least half a decade to build the tech, and there’s no way Larian would agree to licensing out its engine.
Then there’s Larian boss Swen Vincke to contend with. He’s the CEO of the company and the majority shareholder, but he’s also the director of Baldur’s Gate 3, which means he is free to make creative decisions — for better and for worse. Most triple-A studio CEOs do not have such freedom or control.
“Swen’s always going to be the master of building those kinds of things,” Ohlen said. “It’s really hard to take him off that throne, just because of everything — the tools, institutional knowledge, team.”
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
