Original Baldur's Gate programmer and former Dragon Age producer at BioWare Mark Darrah has a worthwhile plan for bringing the hypothetical Baldur's Gate 4 into reality. All you need to do is convince 2023's Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian to hand over the keys to its proprietary Divinity Engine.
Darrah tells FRVR in a new interview that he imagines Baldur's Gate 4 as "an oversized expansion pack for Baldur's Gate 3," and he recommends someone "get Larian to agree to license out the Divinity Engine." But that seems unlikely to happen soon.
Larian CEO Swen Vincke wants nothing to do with Baldur's Gate right now. Or, really, ever. He said definitively in 2024, "We're not going to make new expansions which everybody is expecting. We're not going to make Baldur's Gate 4 which everybody is expecting us to do. We're going to move on."
So, Dungeons & Dragons IP parent company Hasbro started steering, asking former BioWare lead James Ohlen to create Baldur's Gate 4. While initially horrified at the prospect, Ohlen wondered if Hasbro could get Larian to license out its recent Divinity Engine 4.0, which Baldur's Gate 3 uses, but he became certain he wouldn't know what to do with it, anyway.
Ohlen said, "Swen's always going to be the master of building those kinds of things. It's really hard to take him off that throne."
Even if a confident knave wanted to knock Vincke off his pedestal, Larian has seemingly grown quite protective of its Divinity Engine. Originally, Larian created the Divinity Engine while working on Divinity: Original Sin in 2014, and the developer soon released a toolkit to the people and even made official tutorials for modders on how to use it. The same is not true for 4.0, which Larian is holding close, though plenty of Baldur's Gate 3 fans wish it wasn't.
Darrah recognizes one possibility: "Someone new comes along and they do not understand that scaffolding, they do not have many, many, many, many years building this kind of RPG, likely. I mean, maybe bring on Owlcat or someone like that… but you're going to get that same kind of thing."
But the Dragon Age vet isn't completely deterred. He still believes in the idea of a Baldur's Gate 3 expansion. To Hasbro, he says, "If you really want to make Baldur’s Gate 4 that's actually probably the way to go."
"The alternative," he continues, "is you go and say, 'Okay, we're going to call it Baldur's Gate 4. We're going to buy everyone asbestos pantsuits and we're going to just put the spurs to it and go way out here and we're going to do something really different."
The other alternative, I think, is that Baldur's Gate 4 won't exist for a long, long time.
