Surprising the audience in his talk today at GDC, Larian founder and CEO Swen Vincke announced that the developer of Baldur's Gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin will not be creating any DLC or expansions for the game and, in fact, will leave the world of Dungeons & Dragons. back completely.
At the end of his talk, Vincke said: “I told you at the beginning that we were a company of big ideas. We are not a company made to create DLC or expansions. In fact, we tried several times. We failed every time. “It's not our thing. . Life is too short. “Our ambitions are very big.”
Vincke continued: “Baldur's Gate will always have a warm place in our hearts. We will always be proud of it, but we will not continue in it. We will not make new expansions, something everyone expects us to do.” “We're not going to do Baldur's Gate 4, which everyone expects us to do. We're going to move on, move away from D&D and start doing something new.
“I say it here because we have a forum and we are bombarded by people who expect us to do these things, but that is not for us. It will be up to Wizards of the Coast, it is their intellectual property, to find someone to take over. We did our job” .
That news may well come as a surprise to Baldur's Gate fans eagerly awaiting more from the developer, though perhaps not to those familiar with Larian and Vincke in particular. The studio is fiercely independent, as exemplified by Vincke's impassioned speech against the “greed” of some publishers at the Game Developer Awards the night before.
Vincke followed up those comments with another tweet today, citing the Eurogamer article:
“For the avoidance of doubt, there are many people in publishing that I met who have their hearts in the right place. This message was for those who are trying to double their income year after year. You don't have to slow down and aim to improve “The state of the art, without squeezing every last drop. And respect the people who make the games. You'll find it brings you more joy.”
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It's a sentiment he echoed in his talk. “When you're making a game, well, you know that feeling, when you play a game or read a book or watch a movie, you get that feeling of euphoria? That's really what you're looking for. I keep talking about it, but it's because it's really fundamental to Our spirit as game developers is what we pursue, it is what we try to achieve in everything we do.
“You'll only get a game that gives you this if you continually pursue it. It really should be the 'KPI' of game development, to use the word KPI again. Because if you put the player first and try to make them feel that feeling, everything else will continue. You will get word of mouth, and word of mouth is the best marketing tool in the world. When your friends tell you “this is what you should be”, play it!”, you will play it; If you tell your friends, it will have an effect that you cannot replace with a marketing campaign. It's really fundamental to what I believe.”
Vincke also revealed a few more surprises in the talk. For one, he showed a clip of an early version of the beloved High Elf Astarion as Tiefling, the in-game horned demon-like characters immortalized by Karlach, before he eventually converted to his current form.
