Larian was "thinking about" Baldur's Gate 4, but D&D 5E wouldn't work with "all these ideas of new combat that we wanted to try out"

Larian is moving away from Dungeons & Dragons and Baldur's Gate for its next project, but CEO Swen Vincke says the studio had made a start on Baldur's Gate 3 DLC and was even thinking about a proper sequel before the final decision was made.

"Because of all the success, the obvious thing would've been to do DLC," Vincke tells IGN. "So we started on one and we started even thinking about BG 4, but we noticed very rapidly that our hearts were not ticking faster. We hadn't really had closure on BG 3 yet, and just to jump forward into something new felt wrong."

Part of the reason for the switch is simply that Larian didn't want to keep trying to adapt Dungeons & Dragons. "We also had spent a whole bunch of time converting the system into a video game, and we wanted to do new things," Vincke says.

"There were a lot of constraints in making D&D, and the 5th Edition is not an easy system to put into a video game, and we had all these ideas of new combat that we wanted to try out, and so they were not compatible. You could see the team was doing it because everybody felt like we had to do it, but it wasn't really coming from the heart and we're very much a studio all about being from the heart."

If you're hoping for more from the world and characters of Baldur's Gate 3, well, that won't be coming from Larian. "They belong to Wizards now, so I mean, I hope that they're going to honor the legacy and get really good people on them," Vincke says, "but as far as we are concerned, the chapter is closed. There's closure for us."

Last week, Vincke teased Larian's ambitions to build a "very big RPG that will dwarf them all," hinting that the Divinity: Original Sin games, Baldur's Gate 3, and even the studio's next major game are helping to build the foundations for this ultimate title. Moving away from D&D will certainly give Larian some more freedom in what's coming next, and designing its own systems could make that next game even better.

Last year, CRPG vet Josh Sawyer suggested that D&D 5E is one of Baldur's Gate 3's "biggest stumbling blocks."