Although a considerable amount of time passed between the second and third installments, the third game still achieved outstanding results.
Mark Darrah worked as a programmer on the first two Baldur’s Gate games, as well as Neverwinter Nights and Jade Empire. He then served as executive producer on the Dragon Age series from Origins to Inquisition, before leaving in 2020 and returning in 2023 to help develop The Veilguard. He knows BioWare’s RPGs well and, in an interview with FRVR, explained why he believes Baldur’s Gate 3 was such a great sequel. In fact, it was so successful that it overshadowed the previous games, generated massive revenue, and remains one of the most popular games on Steam even three years after its release.
According to Darrah, this is due to Larian’s willingness to forge its own path with the sequel. He says that Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity resembles an Infinity Engine game. While these are great games, he believes this is also a limiting factor. Baldur’s Gate 3 actually resembles Larian’s Divinity series more than the games it is named after – and those Divinity games are brilliant RPGs too. The problem for Hasbro, the owner of Baldur’s Gate, is that Larian’s work may have turned out a little too well. The company now finds itself with an extremely lucrative game IP that no one wants to touch – because who would want to follow the Beatles? Darrah has an opinion on this too: he suggests creating a game similar to Fallout: New Vegas.
“The reality is that the industry has moved on so much since then that I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, this is a really faithful adaptation of that,’ but it turns out that I don’t actually want that anymore. Larian is influenced by Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, but also by Divine Divinity. Their own track record and what CRPGs have become in the intervening 20 years have also influenced them. So I think it’s a great sequel. Given that large gap, I think they did the right thing. They should get Larian to agree to license out the Divinity Engine and essentially let someone make an oversized expansion pack for Baldur’s Gate 3 and call it Baldur’s Gate 4. That could work” Darrah said.
And why not? He has a point.
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