Baldur's Gate 3 developer initially started work on a follow-up as it was "the obvious thing"

Larian began a continuation of its work on the beloved Baldur's Gate 3 last year as it was "the obvious thing" to do - before ultimately deciding to change course.

Speaking to PC Gamer on the anniversary of Baldur's Gate 3's full release, Larian boss Swen Vincke said the initial decision to continue working on the Dungeons & Dragons-based franchise saw his team focus on an obvious follow-up - an idea that sounds like it was initially pitched as an expansion, before being considered as the basis for a potential Baldur's Gate 4.

"It's something that you all would have liked, I think," Vincke said. "I'm sure, actually. And we actually went pretty fast, because the production machine was still warm. You could already play stuff."

So why did plans change? Vincke says the idea was initially something the team believed it could get done in a year, as what sounds like an expansion - but then realised it would require much longer.

"It's going to take two, three years. And having just done six years of D&D, which is not our own thing, are we really going to spend all this time on this and abandon our own plans? Yeah, maybe not for an add-on, but maybe BG4? That makes a lot of sense. So why don't we do it for BG4? Oh, yeah, that sounds like a really good idea. Let's make BG4. All the stuff that we did for this thing, we can just move it in there, people are gonna love it. Go for it."

But this then sparked a similar thought process, Vincke continued, with the team considering whether it really did want to continue holding off it's own plans even longer to begin another mammoth D&D game development. After a rethink over the Christmas break, the decision was made to do something different entirely.

"It very rapidly turned, and I don't think, as developers, we ever felt better since we took that decision," Vincke concluded. "Honestly, you really cannot explain or express it, how liberated we are. So morale is super high, just because we're doing new stuff again. We're doing our own thing again, we're not rehashing, we're not trying to convert rules from 50 years ago into something new."

Little is known about what Larian is developing next, other than it has two projects in the works, and that it considers another early access launch to be likely. We do know, however, it definitely isn't Baldur's Gate 4 - although that doesn't stop another studio stepping in to make it instead.