Hasbro has “a lot of people very interested in Baldur’s Gate”, as developer Larian moves away from the series.
Baldur’s Gate 3 released towards the end of 2023, and became a smashing success for Dungeons and Dragons owner Hasbro as well as Larian. The game won scores of praise (and awards) across the world, and last year Larian’s director of publishing Michael Douse revealed the game’s average daily peak concurrents were up by a not-to-be-sniffed-at three percent in 2024 over 2023.
However, despite this heady success, Larian is moving on from Baldur’s Gate, and has confirmed two games are currently in the works – both of which will be based on its own IPs and described as the studio’s “best work ever”. So, where does that leave the future of Baldur’s Gate? Well, there are plenty of others who are “very interested” in Baldur’s Gate, SVP of digital games at Hasbro Dan Ayoub has said.
“We’re kind of working out our plans for the future and what we’re going to be doing with that. And actually, in pretty short order, we’re going to have some stuff to talk about around that,” Ayoub told IGN during this week’s GDC event in San Francisco.
Now, while the wording of “in pretty short order” certainly sounds promising, this doesn’t mean we are about to suddenly get Baldur’s Gate 4. In fact, Hasbro isn’t “in a hurry” for that particular game.
“That’s the thing, we’re going to take a very measured approach… We’ve got a lot of plans, a lot of different ways to go about it. We’re starting to think about, okay, yeah, we’re ready to start dipping toes a little bit and talking about a few things,” Ayoub explained, with the publication adding the exec said he eventually wants a Baldur’s Gate 4, but it will take some time.
As for other Hasbro Dungeons and Dragons games, Ayoub said he is “never one to shy down from a challenge”. After all, there are several other D&D-based games in the works, and in November Hasbro announced following the success of Baldur’s Gate 3, yet another Dungeons & Dragons game was in production.
“I think anything that forces us to raise our creative bar, and developers love to have a high bar to go after, and I think we’ve actually seen the team push some really interesting ideas that they’re like, ‘Okay, we need to raise our bar. We need to go bigger on this.’ And things like that. So, I think that’s our hope, right? We would keep raising the bar and everyone just tries to go a little higher,” Ayoub closed.
For more on Baldur’s Gate, be sure to check out our Bertie’s feature The making of the Dark Urge in Baldur’s Gate 3, where he chats with Larian about how the team honoured BioWare’s story while creating its “most heroic” playthrough yet.