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Baldur's Gate 2's co-lead designer was asked to make Baldur's Gate 4 after Larian declined: 'Having to compete against Baldur's Gate 3? That would be insanity'
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After the stratospheric success of Baldur's Gate 3, Hasbro was naturally keen for a follow-up. The only problem? Larian wasn't interested in doing Baldur's Gate 4. And it turns out the second person Hasbro asked didn't want the job either.
Larian famously decided to move on from Baldur's Gate and get back to working on properties it owned. This wasn't a decision made in haste, either. When the call was made, it was still committed to supporting BG3—netting players DLC-sized updates doled out for free—and it had even started work on Baldur's Gate 4.
Swen Vincke told me that he was "vulnerable" after the launch of BG3, and in that state agreed to make a sequel. "You tend to be prone to do the obvious thing, which was really just make an add-on, or a standalone add-on, or start working on a sequel, because it's the easiest route to take."
Larian even had a partially-playable build up and running. But Vincke realised that Larian would be stuck "doing the same thing" if it continued with Baldur's Gate 4—years of working in someone else's sandbox, iterating, throwing stuff out, early access, everything the studio had just finished. So he spoke to his teams, and they agreed: "We should be looking at how we can do stuff that we get excited about." And Larian's BG4 was no more.
But Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast were lucky enough to have former Baldur's Gate developers on the payroll, working at Archetype Entertainment on Exodus, including both of Baldur's Gate 2's co-lead designers, James Ohlen and Kevin Martens.
It was Ohlen, Archetype's studio boss, who Hasbro turned to.
"The day [Chris Cox, Hasbro CEO] knew they weren't going to do it, he called me. 'Hey James, what do you think about doing Baldur's Gate 4?' And I was like, 'I don't, I would fail, and here's why I would fail.'"
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Ohlen thought he'd struggle to achieve what Larian did. It had been the perfect studio for BG3, because it already had all the tools and the people. BG3 was really born out of the work done on Divinity: Original Sin and its sequel.