// PC GAMER — GAMING
Hasbro should stop looking for a Baldur's Gate 4 studio and take a leaf out of Larian's book by trying something new
Baldur's Gate has peaked, but D&D still has a lot to offer.
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Welcome to Dungeon Master, PC Gamer's regular RPG column, where Online Editor Fraser Brown delves into PC gaming's most beloved and enduring genre. Grab a seat in our badly-lit tavern and please ignore the goblin puke.
Larian didn't want to make Baldur's Gate 4, BioWare veteran James Ohlen didn't want to make Baldur's Gate 4, so who's going to make it? I'm not going to answer that question, not just because I don't have a clue, but because I'm starting to think that nobody should make it.
Please stop throwing rotten veg and goblins at me—at least until the end of the article. Then you can chuck away. Thank you.
Anyway, James Ohlen is to blame for putting this idea in my head. When we interviewed Ohlen a wee while ago, he said something that stuck with me. "I wouldn't want to compete against that. Doing Exodus is hard enough, but having to compete against Baldur's Gate 3? That would be insanity."
Ohlen went on to shower Swen Vincke and Larian with compliments, but his hesitancy wasn't exclusively down to how talented the team was—it was also uniquely positioned to create BG3. It had the engine, the infrastructure and the institutional knowledge required to make something like this.
He believes that BG4 would need fresh faces. Developers with the confidence of old BioWare, back when the studio didn't know its limitations and just wanted to do its own thing.
"That was me back in Baldur's Gate. I was like 'Everyone else sucks and we're going to crush it.' It was us against all the other game studios, we're going to outdo them. And because none of us had built games before, we were all like, 'We're going to do everything different.' And sometimes you need that."
When BioWare made BG1, it wasn't weighed down by all these expectations.