While both Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 received quite extensive add-ons more than 20 years ago, the developer Larian Studios doesn’t seem to have such things on the agenda for the current third part. Although the recently released successful RPG only offers 12 of the 20 possible levels from the underlying rules of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), according to Larian founder Swen Vincke, these make implementation difficult.
“Honestly, we haven’t started an expansion yet,” Vincke said in a recent interview with PC Gamer. According to him, he would find it “very difficult” to develop an adventure that takes players from level 12 to level 20, since in D&D these levels grant players god-like powers. “Level 12-20 adventures require a different approach to the antagonists you’re up against, and they require a lot of development work to get them right,” Vincke said.
Baldur’s Gate 3: High development effort for add-on
“That would push the development effort well beyond an expansion. Many D&D adventures are below level 12 for this very reason. So it sounds like clean, simple expansion material until you start thinking about it and it’s not as simple as you imagine.” There is also another complicating factor in developing a Baldur’s Gate 3 expansion starting at level 13: all the possible endings of the completed Baldur’s Gate 3 campaign that feed into that starting point. If Larian were to build something like this, “you’d have to wait a very long time”.
Baldur’s Gate 3 Add-on: If only then secret
So Vincke didn’t say a definitive “never” in the interview, but an extension seems unlikely at the moment. In recent interviews he has expressed his interest in Larian working on several smaller projects after Baldur’s Gate 3 and he also wants to return to the Divinity series one day. There is therefore a plan for the studio after Baldur’s Gate 3, but details are not yet revealed.
“I know what we want to do and the team also knows where we want to go. We’ll see where that ends up. I’ve learned in the past that you have to be careful announcing things before they’re done, because sometimes you have to cancel them because they don’t work. We could be working on an extension and it could be boring, and then we should stop working on it,” said Vincke.
“Because if we continued to work on something that’s boring, we’d have to sell it to you guys, and then we’d have to say, ‘Here’s a boring thing and we want you to buy it.’ That wouldn’t be cool. So we have to have the freedom to experiment and do our stuff, and then when we’re ready to announce it, we’re going to do it.”
Baldur’s Gate 3 coming with more mods soon
Meanwhile, it wasn’t too specific in terms of possible additions by the community either, but as for upcoming mod tools, the Larian founder revealed that mod support will “improve dramatically” after the release of the PS5 version in September. . Meanwhile there are already a few first mods for difficulty, DLSS and The WItcher.
