RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Mark Darrah was a programmer on the original Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2, along with Neverwinter Nights and Jade Empire, and served as executive producer of the Dragon Age series from Origins through Inquisition before leaving in 2020—and coming back in 2023 to kick in on The Veilguard. He knows a thing or two about BioWare RPGs, in other words, and speaking to FRVR he said he also knows why Baldur's Gate 3 was such a great sequel—so great that it has overshadowed the games that came before it, made mounts of money, and is still among the most popular games on Steam three years after release.
Darrah reckons that's a direct result of Larian's willingness to do its own thing with the sequel. Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity "feels like an Infinity Engine game," Darrah said (and he's 100% correct on that), and they're great, but Darrah says that's also a very limiting factor: "The reality is that the industry has moved on so much since then that I was like, oh yeah, this is a really faithful adaptation of that and it turns out that I didn’t actually want that anymore."
Larian, on the other hand, "are Baldur’s Gate 2 and Baldur’s Gate 1-flavoured, but they’re also Divine Divinity-flavoured. They are flavoured by their own track record, they are flavoured by what CRPGs have become in the intervening 20 years. So I think it’s a great sequel. I think they did what is the right thing to do given that large of a gap."
Baldur's Gate 3 really is more akin to Larian's Divinity games than its namesakes, and those Divinity games are brilliant RPGs too. Original Sin 2 took our Game of the Year crown in 2017: PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon said at the time that "there's never been an RPG with a story or characters this interesting that you can play co-op with four players," which is also a pretty spot-on description of Baldur's Gate 3.
The problem for Baldur's Gate owner Hasbro is that Larian's work was maybe a little too great: The company now finds itself in possession of a massively lucrative videogame property that nobody wants to touch because, basically, who wants to go on after The Beatles? Darrah has thoughts on that too—basically, do a Fallout: New Vegas with it.
"Get Larian to agree to license out the Divinity Engine and essentially let someone make an oversized expansion pack for Baldur’s Gate 3 and call that Baldur’s Gate 4," Darrah said. "That could work."
Conversely, it could take the approach suggested by PC Gamer editor Fraser Brown: Just don't.
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