Developer Larian Studios has officially bid a fond farewell to Baldur’s Gate 3 following April’s massive Update 8 patch, and with the team now focusing on the future, company boss Swen Vincke has shared a little more on why it ultimately decided against releasing a paid DLC expansion for the acclaimed RPG, calling it the “boring” option.
Vincke first addressed the idea of Baldur’s Gate 3 DLC all the way back in September 2023, around a month after the game had launched to a stellar critical and commercial reception. At the time, he said building on the base game would be “very hard” for the team, but “not undoable”. But just five months later, all fan hopes for DLC were dashed when Vincke confirmed the studio was “gonna move on”, meaning no DLC and no Baldur’s Gate 4. “We are not a company that’s made to create DLCs, expansions,” he explained. “We tried that actually, a few times. We failed every time – it’s not our thing. Life is too short. Our ambitions are very large.”
And now, in a new interview with Game Spot, Vincke has turned to the topic of DLC once more. When asked why Larian had ultimately opted against creating DLC for Baldur’s Gate 3 despite it being such a massive success, he replied, “It’s boring, is really the honest answer. We tried to be in the DLC business, talked about that with BG3… there’s just no passion… I mean happy player, happy business, but you also need a happy developer for a happy player. What we’re doing now makes developers way more happy.”
“We heard it’s what we were supposed to do, right? You’ve got a huge game, a huge hit, and you’ve gotta make DLC this and DLC that and DLC there… and money’s gonna pile up all high! And we just nodded and said, ‘Yeah we’ll make DLCs’. And then the moment that we had some time to think, we realised, ‘What are you doing?’. Progressive insight is not a bad thing, so sometimes you go down the wrong path and then say, ‘Oh fuck it’, and just change course.”
As for what Larian is doing now Baldur’s Gate 3 is mostly all wrapped up (minus any lingering bug fixes), that remains a mystery. All Vincke would say during his Game Spot interview is that the studio is now “deep in the trenches” of its “next big thing” – a “crazy ambitious” project that’s “shaping up quite well”. And, of course, it’s not the only thing Larian is working on, with Vincke having previously confirmed preparation for a second project is also underway. This, he admitted, is “not the easiest thing in the universe, because we make very complicated games, lots of permutations, lots of agency for players.”