As D&D owner Wizards says "of course we want to do a successor" to Baldur's Gate 3, we wonder who will make it and what kind of game it will be
Roll up, roll up.
It would be silly if Wizards of the Coast, the brilliantly named company in charge of Dungeons & Dragons, didn't do a follow-up to Baldur's Gate 3, given the barnstorming success that game has enjoyed - and the wonders it's done for the D&D brand. Indeed Hasbro, the owner of Wizards, has talked quite openly about wanting a successor before, which is why it's no surprise to hear Wizards president John Hight tell The Game Business just the other day that, "Baldur's Gate [3] is an incredible game, and of course we're going to do a successor." But it begs the bigger question of who will make it.
Remember, Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian is out of the picture. That studio has unequivocally stated it will not be making Baldur's Gate 4. "It's gonna be up to Wizards of the Coast - it's their IP - to find somebody to take over the torch. We did our job," Larian founder and Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke told an audience at GDC in 2024. Larian has instead moved onto making two games of its own, and all we know is they aren't D&D.
If not Larian then who? In The Game Business interview, John Hight - who led the Warcraft business at Blizzard for a number of years, before joining Wizards as president about a year ago - was paired with Stig Asmussen, another celebrated developer, who's leading a team making a game for Wizards. But that game also won't be Baldur's Gate 4.
"This is not the successor to that game," Hight said. "We go to Stig and his team to tell an incredible story and bring D&D to a very broad audience. Ideally, the game will appeal to D&D players because it will help them realise their imagination. But it's also going to hopefully appeal to people that love playing action games, that love the Jedi games, that love God of War games."
The mention of the Star Wars Jedi games and God of War games comes from Asmussen being creative director of God of War 3, and director of both Jedi games from Respawn. His expertise, then, is in cinematic third-person action games, which is presumably what this mystery D&D-related project will be.
Here's Asmussen: "The decision to go with D&D wasn't very difficult, because it plays into the wheelhouse of the things we've done in the past, like God of War, and the Jedi Series. We wanted to sink our teeth into something that's legendary, that's mythical, that has a lot of space for us to spread our wings, jump into a world and capture the spirit of it."