It would be silly if Wizards of the Coast, the brilliantly named company in charge of Dungeons & Dragons, didn’t do a follow-up to Baldur’s Gate 3, given the barnstorming success that game has enjoyed – and the wonders it’s done for the D&D brand. Indeed Hasbro, the owner of Wizards, has talked quite openly about wanting a successor before, which is why it’s no surprise to hear Wizards president John Hight tell The Game Business just the other day that, “Baldur’s Gate [3] is an incredible game, and of course we’re going to do a successor.” But it begs the bigger question of who will make it.
Remember, Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian is out of the picture. That studio has unequivocally stated it will not be making Baldur’s Gate 4. “It’s gonna be up to Wizards of the Coast – it’s their IP – to find somebody to take over the torch. We did our job,” Larian founder and Baldur’s Gate 3 director Swen Vincke told an audience at GDC in 2024. Larian has instead moved onto making two games of its own, and all we know is they aren’t D&D.
If not Larian then who? In The Game Business interview, John Hight – who led the Warcraft business at Blizzard for a number of years, before joining Wizards as president about a year ago – was paired with Stig Asmussen, another celebrated developer, who’s leading a team making a game for Wizards. But that game also won’t be Baldur’s Gate 4.
“This is not the successor to that game,” Hight said. “We go to Stig and his team to tell an incredible story and bring D&D to a very broad audience. Ideally, the game will appeal to D&D players because it will help them realise their imagination. But it’s also going to hopefully appeal to people that love playing action games, that love the Jedi games, that love God of War games.”
The mention of the Star Wars Jedi games and God of War games comes from Asmussen being creative director of God of War 3, and director of both Jedi games from Respawn. His expertise, then, is in cinematic third-person action games, which is presumably what this mystery D&D-related project will be.
Here’s Asmussen: “The decision to go with D&D wasn’t very difficult, because it plays into the wheelhouse of the things we’ve done in the past, like God of War, and the Jedi Series. We wanted to sink our teeth into something that’s legendary, that’s mythical, that has a lot of space for us to spread our wings, jump into a world and capture the spirit of it.”
That’s Asmussen’s studio Giant Skull out of the picture, then, so which other studios does Wizards have which can do a successor to Baldur’s Gate 3? You might remember a story from roughly a year ago where Wizards talked about having invested $1bn on internally made video games, split across the four studios it owns. Two of these studios we can also rule out immediately because we know what they’re making and it’s not Baldur’s Gate, or even D&D.
One of these is Archetype Studios in Austin, led by BioWare alumni James Ohlen, who would have been perfect for Baldur’s Gate having led development on Dragon Age: Origins. But he’s leading development of the very Mass Effect-like Exodus, which I’m excited about. I read the accompanying TTRPG book recently and it’s got some intriguing ideas around time dilation. The other studio we can rule out is Atomic Arcade, which is making a grown-up take on GI Joe, with a game based on the character Snake Eyes. This leaves two internal studios for consideration: Invoke and Skeleton Key.
We already know Invoke is working on a D&D game because the Canadian studio makes no attempt to hide it. Invoke openly states on its website that, “We are working on a triple-A game set in the world’s most iconic role-playing universe – Dungeons & Dragons.” A press release from 2022 supports this and adds that the game will be made in Unreal Engine 5, and the team will grow to 200 people to make it. LinkedIn shows that the company is currently at around 175 people. But will this game really be a successor to Baldur’s Gate 3?
Reasons to doubt it: the project was announced October 2022, which was nearly a year before Baldur’s Gate 3 was fully released. Did Wizards already know how successful the game would be then? It had been successful in Early Access success at that point so promising signs were there, but I don’t think anyone – certainly not Larian – expected the success Baldur’s Gate 3 ultimately had. Would Wizards really have been confident enough back then to bet on a successor? Remember, Baldur’s Gate 3 made this genre trendy again – its enormous success revived it. I doubt Wizards was rushing to make another turn-based RPG before it saw how Baldur’s Gate 3 did.
My second reason to doubt is a little flimsier, and it’s to do with the studio’s expertise. Invoke is led by Dominic Guay, a former Ubisoft developer who helped shape the Splinter Cell, Far Cry and Watch Dogs series, none of which are anything like Baldur’s Gate 3. What’s more, Invoke grew out of a studio called Tuque Games, which made the rather abysmal (but I still quite liked it) D&D: Dark Alliance revival. That was a third-person co-operative action RPG. This track record doesn’t shout isometric turn-based RPG development to me.
Which leaves us with internal Wizards studio number four: Skeleton Key, which coincidentally is the place Dragon Age: Veilguard director Corinne Busche ended up. Skeleton Key doesn’t broadcast what kind of game it’s making but does say, on its website, that its mission is to make “thought-provoking moments of suspense and horror that guide players to have fun while facing their fears”. This tallies with the Wizards interview I linked further up, where Skeleton Key was said to be “doing something spooky”. Could this be D&D?
D&D does have scarier settings. The mist-encircled land of Ravenloft is among the oldest and most famous of them, housing the iconic Curse of Strahd campaign – a story that sees players terrorised by a vampire lord again and again as they adventure in a dour and cursed land. I’ve played it and I would certainly play a video game adaptation of it, but it doesn’t really sound like a follow-up to Baldur’s Gate 3. And again, Skeleton Key’s project was announced back in 2022, long before Baldur’s Gate 3’s full release.
Plans do change, however, as long as there’s an event seismic enough to shake them, and the phenomenal success of Baldur’s Gate 3 certainly fits that description. Perhaps these studios’ efforts were repurposed following the game’s release. Or maybe Wizards is looking externally for a development partner again, as Larian once was, as Giant Skull is, which would open a whole industry of possibilities. Apparently it has had “lots of interest” in this regard.
But there is another more fundamental problem with following Baldur’s Gate 3, and it’s to do with the game itself. Baldur’s Gate 3 is an incredibly hard act to follow. Larian specialises in this stuff, in this kind of systemic gameplay and densely webbed storytelling, full of choice and consequence. It’s taken more than a decade of trial and error, and learned lessons, and a tweaked and tuned Divinity Engine to get here. Which other studio could emulate it? Would another studio be able to use the engine? Hasbro and Wizards might lay claim to the characters created for Baldur’s Gate 3, as they’re created, effectively, for the D&D universe. But the code belongs to Larian.
Plus, there aren’t many, if any, developers doing games like Baldur’s Gate 3 at that level. The only studio I can think of that comes close is Owlcat Games, which made the well regarded Pathfinder RPGs and the “gloriously faithful” Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader. But Owlcat is currently employed making the exciting-looking Expanse game Osiris Reborn (another game that looks like Mass Effect). And the danger with trying to emulate something but not getting close to the quality or scope of it, is that you’ll suffer by comparison. A better idea might be to do something creatively different.
Make a clean break. Pull the action into an over-the-shoulder view and make the game a more real-time experience, a more action-like experience. Evoke the same feeling as Baldur’s Gate 3, and maybe bring back some of the characters, but be a spin-off rather than a direct successor. It stretches the meaning of the term “successor”, yes, but no one has ever referred to this project as Baldur’s Gate 4, tellingly, and doing this gets the project away from direct comparisons and gives more creative freedom. Done this way, Invoke’s third-person action RPG experience might become relevant again.
In time, we’ll see. Can Wizards of the Coast establish a video game-making business of its own that will rival its TTPRG and collectible card-game businesses? The potential is there but the execution will be key.
