Baldur's Gate 3 devs aren't working on an expansion yet, and they're scared of high-level D&D

BG3
(Image credit: Larian)

Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian Studios has not yet begun to work on an expansion for the game, and while the possibility hasn't been ruled out, it seems that the studio has some trepidation about directly continuing the story.

"Honestly, we haven't started on an expansion," Larian CEO Swen Vincke told our friends at PC Gamer. That's partly down to the fact that, as with many tabletop D&D adventures, the Baldur's Gate 3 level cap limits your characters to level 12 to prevent them from ascending to the near-godhood offered by the ruleset's high-level abilities.

Vincke said those high level adventures "require a different way of doing things, in terms of antagonists you're going to have to deal with, which require a lot of development to do them properly. Which would make this much more than an expansion in terms of development effort. A lot of D&D adventures are sub-level 12 for precisely that reason. So it sounds like neat, easy expansion material until you start thinking about it and it's not as easy as one would imagine."

Larian does have some plans for what it'll be working on next, but Vincke added that the studio is hesitant to make any early announcements for fear that development will fizzle out and fans will end up disappointed. "We could work on an expansion and it could be boring, and we should stop working on it. Because if we would continue on something that's boring, we would then have to sell it to you, and then we'd have to say 'here's a boring thing, and we want you to buy it.' That would not be cool."

In other recent interviews, Vincke has noted that the studio intends to go back to the Divinity: Original Sin series "at some point," though only after a break, "because we will need to refresh ourselves creatively" following the development of Baldur's Gate 3.

Baldur's Gate 3 has been smashing Steam records left and right. 

Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.