Hasbro should stop looking for a Baldur's Gate 4 studio and take a leaf out of Larian's book by trying something new

Dungeon Master

Welcome to Dungeon Master, PC Gamer's regular RPG column, where Online Editor Fraser Brown delves into PC gaming's most beloved and enduring genre. Grab a seat in our badly-lit tavern and please ignore the goblin puke.

Larian didn't want to make Baldur's Gate 4, BioWare veteran James Ohlen didn't want to make Baldur's Gate 4, so who's going to make it? I'm not going to answer that question, not just because I don't have a clue, but because I'm starting to think that nobody should make it.

Please stop throwing rotten veg and goblins at me—at least until the end of the article. Then you can chuck away. Thank you.

Anyway, James Ohlen is to blame for putting this idea in my head. When we interviewed Ohlen a wee while ago, he said something that stuck with me. "I wouldn't want to compete against that. Doing Exodus is hard enough, but having to compete against Baldur's Gate 3? That would be insanity."

Ohlen went on to shower Swen Vincke and Larian with compliments, but his hesitancy wasn't exclusively down to how talented the team was—it was also uniquely positioned to create BG3. It had the engine, the infrastructure and the institutional knowledge required to make something like this.

He believes that BG4 would need fresh faces. Developers with the confidence of old BioWare, back when the studio didn't know its limitations and just wanted to do its own thing.

"That was me back in Baldur's Gate. I was like 'Everyone else sucks and we're going to crush it.' It was us against all the other game studios, we're going to outdo them. And because none of us had built games before, we were all like, 'We're going to do everything different.' And sometimes you need that."

When BioWare made BG1, it wasn't weighed down by all these expectations.

Ohlen makes a compelling argument, and I'd love to see a new team take some big, bold swings. But I don't think that's what people really want for a new Baldur's Gate. They're going to be expecting, or at least wanting, something massive, elaborate and polished. Something that favourably compares to BG3. That's way too much to expect from a studio's first game.

When BioWare made BG1, it wasn't weighed down by all these expectations. It could throw out the rule book and almost wing it. But in 2026, the name Baldur's Gate could become a crushing weight for a new studio—it would be a disaster.

The problem is that I don't think one of the more experienced RPG studios would fare much better. Take Beamdog, for example. It's been the custodian of BioWare's classic RPGs since 2012 and has even added to them. It's effectively BioWare's offspring. But it's never been able to step out from the bigger studio's shadow.

Beamdog's Enhanced Editions are great, but the road to these remasters was bumpy, and some of them launched in less than ideal states. I just don't see it managing something as ambitious as Baldur's Gate 4 would need to be—as evidenced by founder Trent Oster's pitch to Hasbro for BG3.

"Our Baldur's Gate 3 wasn't as big picture as what Larian pitched," Oster told us. "Obviously, we were doing it at a much smaller scope. It wasn't going to be a $100 million game. I think we were pitching it in the $20 million range."

Then there's Owlcat. The Pathfinder games are strikingly similar to BioWare's excellent Infinity Engine games, and after some post-launch polish Rogue Trader became one of my favourite CRPGs. But with the studio already dividing its attention between Dark Heresy and its Expanse RPG, Owlcat's busy enough.

Regardless, I don't think it would be right for Baldur's Gate 4. Its approach to RPG systems is very 'more is more', to the point where I eventually found managing my crew and levelling them up in Rogue Trader a chore. And while the move from Pathfinder's RTWP system to a turn-based combat system was very welcome, it was still bloated and plodding.

I just don't think we'll get a better Baldur's Gate.

The thing is, I just don't think we'll get a better Baldur's Gate. Or at least, I don't think there's currently a studio out there that could do a better job, or even a similar job, to Larian. And this isn't a criticism. We're enjoying a golden age of RPGs right now, from expensive behemoths like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, to weird experiments from tiny teams like Esoteric Ebb. But this very specific kind of RPG? Larian utterly dominates it.

With that in mind, I wish Hasbro would take a risk and try something different. Not a new Baldur's Gate, not a new Icewind Dale, not even—and I hate myself for saying it—a new Planescape: Torment. I know I'm being extremely brave for even thinking this, but maybe not everything needs to be a sequel.

Hasbro is in charge of an entire multiverse. D&D is so all-encompassing that you could do pretty much anything with it. Instead of putting all the eggs in the Baldur's Gate basket—especially since OG BG remakes are coming—it should be trying something new. Smaller projects that aren't trying to one-up BG3. These projects could then give the teams working on them the knowledge they need to tackle bigger games, and allow them to develop new tools that could be used to forge ever more impressive worlds.

Larian spent years building up to Baldur's Gate. It had successes, failures, weird pivots, and it almost shut down—all of this contributed to BG3. This is a singular developer, and Hasbro simply isn't going to find another Larian.

But if Hasbro went down the route of nurturing talent, of playing the long game, who knows? Maybe in 10 years we'd get a Baldur's Gate 4 that could meet our incredibly high expectations.

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