"Baldur's Gate will always have a warm spot in our heart. We'll forever be proud of it, but we're not gonna continue in it," said Vincke. "We're gonna move on - we're gonna move away from D&D and start making a new thing."
The news is a little surprising, given Baldur's Gate 3's enormous success. It was well-received by both critics and fans, being the best-reviewed game of 2023 on critical aggregators Metacritic and OpenCritic, as well as taking home Game of the Year and Outstanding Story-Rich Game in the fan-voted Steam Awards. It also sold well, having "way over" ten million active users as of February 2024, according to Michael Douse, Director of Publishing at Larian.
While there will be no major expansions for Baldur's Gate 3, Larian isn't completely finished with it yet. Vincke has promised "a bunch of stuff" coming through updates, but no "new content." Speaking to IGN, he confirmed there would be new endings created for evil characters, and cross-platform official mod support for PC and consoles.
Larian had previously considered making larger DLCs and expansions for Baldur's Gate 3, as mentioned to IGN around the game's launch last August, but those plans never got off the ground. "We are not a company that's made to create DLCs, expansions. We tried that actually, a few times. We failed every time - it's not our thing," according to Vincke in his GDC speech. "Life is too short. Our ambitions are very large."
Vincke has also cited constrictions working with 5th edition (the current D&D ruleset) as a reason the team was eager to move on. "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," he recently told IGN. He was quick, however, to quell online theories that they were leaving D&D behind due to a bad relationship with Wizards of the Coast, describing them as "a great licensor" who let them do their thing.
As for what their next project will be, not much is known except that it won't be Baldur's Gate 4. Vincke has previously indicated that a new Divinity title will definitely happen at some point, but it's unclear if that's the studio's next title. Vincke has said they have two games in development, both of which were ideas the studio had before Baldur's Gate 3, and they will be "different from the things that we've done before." But when directly asked by IGN if one of these titles was a new Divinity game, he refused to answer.
