After the massive success of Baldur’s Gate 3, it would seem natural for developer Larian Studios to continue on with Dungeons & Dragons RPGs. The studio already revealed earlier this year that it was parting ways with Wizards of the Coast and the Dungeons & Dragons series, and now it seems that its next game isn’t necessarily going to be a turn-based RPG at all.
Speaking at Poland’s Digital Dragons game development conference last week, Larian CEO Swen Vincke revealed that the developer’s next game is code named Excalibur, GamePressure reported. But what’s more interesting than what Vincke was ready to reveal about the next game is what he wasn’t.
“If anybody from Larian at this point tells you this is what the game is going to be, they’re lying,” Vincke said. “They don't know because we're trying a whole bunch of things.”
According to Vincke, it’s not even guaranteed that Larian’s next game will be a return to the kind of turn-based strategy it’s made a reputation on so far.
“I love turn-based strategy, but I'm not shy of action,” Vincke said. “You'll have to wait and see.”
Despite Vincke’s comments, it’s not likely that Larian will stray too far from its roots and move into purely action games. For one thing, Larian has made its name on turn-based RPGs, and the team there clearly has plenty of experience and interest in the genre. Both the studio’s reputation and the institutional knowledge of RPGs mean sticking to a similar game is the best chance for Larian to find Baldur’s Gate 3-like success again with its next project. When asked about his “ultimate dream game,” Vincke describes it as “a very big RPG that will dwarf them all.”
Unsurprisingly, Larian’s team is also full of RPG fans who have plenty of ideas about how to keep innovating in the genre.
“I want to make more role-playing games because I want to play them more,” Larian writing director Adam Smith said. “It feels like the richest space.”
Both Vincke and Smith speak of RPGs as a space to tell good stories, which is clearly a focus for the studio and something that will carry forward into whatever kind of game its developers choose to make next. One thing that seems extremely unlikely for Larian’s next project is another game based on an existing franchise. Before the detour into working with another company’s series with Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian worked with original fictional universes.
“To make our game, we need to have a level of freedom that we can only achieve if we are independent,” Vincke said. “We fight very hard for that independence and we're very hard to work with.”
Vincke said that Baldur’s property rights holder Wizards of the Coast didn’t interfere with Larian during the development of Baldur’s Gate 3, but the desire to break away from Dungeons & Dragons reportedly kept the studio from making DLC for the game. Vincke told IGN that Larian developers were “elated” to learn that they were moving away from the series. Given the talk of independence now, Larian seems set on keeping its game next within a world it has total control over. When asked whether that could mean a return to the world Larian established in the Divinity: Original Sin series, Vincke declined to answer.
“Maybe,” he said, “maybe not.”
Earlier this year, Larian announced that it was actually working on two new games to follow Baldur’s Gate 3, which it’s since described as “two very ambitious RPGs.” While that likely conjures visions of new turn-based strategy epics reminiscent of its previous work, the update from Digital Dragons means fans might want to adjust their expectations. Whatever Larian tackles next, it’s likely to follow the story-first format of its previous games, but those ready for a rehash of Baldur’s Gate 3 with a new coat of paint may be surprised when the next titles are released.
