Mark Darrah believes Wizards of the Coast should approach Baldur’s Gate 4 by following a development model similar to the one that produced Fallout: New Vegas. According to the former Dragon Age executive, a new team could preserve the third game’s most important qualities only by gaining access to Larian Studios’ technology and established development foundations.

Nearly three years have passed since Baldur’s Gate 3 arrived, and Wizards of the Coast, which owns the Dungeons & Dragons intellectual property, is already considering how to keep the RPG series moving forward. The most obvious option would be to reach an agreement with another developer to create Baldur’s Gate 4, but Larian Studios has chosen to devote its resources to a new Divinity project. No studio has yet emerged that appears capable of matching the quality of the 2023 Game of the Year winner. Mark Darrah nevertheless sees a less complicated way for the publisher to sustain enthusiasm for the franchise: borrow the model Obsidian Entertainment used when it created Fallout: New Vegas.

Darrah, a former leader on the Dragon Age franchise who also contributed to the original Baldur’s Gate, outlined his proposal during an interview with FRVR. In his view, assigning Baldur’s Gate 4 to an entirely new team working with a different engine would almost inevitably strip away numerous systems and smaller touches that Larian designed for the third instalment. The Belgian developer spent years refining its particular approach to role-playing games and poured lessons from its previous projects into the adventure set in the Forgotten Realms. A successor would therefore need to understand more than one successful game; it would have to absorb a design philosophy built and polished across many years.

Any developer inheriting the Baldur’s Gate series would consequently face an extremely difficult problem, Darrah argued. “Someone new comes in and doesn’t understand that basic structure; they probably won’t have many years of experience creating this type of RPG,” he explained. A studio such as Owlcat Games, known for Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, might be one possible candidate, but even that would not eliminate the underlying risk. “But you’ll still encounter the same thing: there will be some truly fantastic and interesting new features, but a lot will also be lost, either because they didn’t think of them, because they didn’t realize their importance, or because they didn’t know how to implement them.”

The Plan Would Depend on Larian Studios’ Engine

For that reason, Darrah believes Larian Studios would remain essential to the success of any hypothetical Baldur’s Gate 4. He is not suggesting that the Belgian studio is the only developer capable of producing a worthy sequel, but rather that its technology would allow another team to build from the same foundations. A comparable arrangement shaped Fallout: New Vegas, with Obsidian Entertainment relying on the Gamebryo engine and technical framework previously used for Fallout 3. The result was not merely an imitation, but an entry that eventually became one of the most cherished games in the post-apocalyptic franchise.

Darrah is not proposing a disconnected spin-off either. “Convince Larian to license their Divinity Engine and, in short, get someone to make a large-scale expansion for Baldur’s Gate 3 and call it Baldur’s Gate 4. That will work,” he continued. He said this would probably be his recommendation to Wizards of the Coast if the company genuinely intends to develop a fourth game, although a far more radical alternative would also remain available. “The alternative is to say, ‘Okay, let’s call it Baldur’s Gate 4. Let’s go full throttle, move away from the conventional, and do something really different.’” For now, the future depends on the publisher’s next move, as the company has encouraged the creation of more video games based on its properties while its handling of that business has also left it facing a multimillion-dollar financial gap.

Source: 3DJuegos