The scrapped Baldur's Gate 3 add-on was playable when Larian canned it, and director Swen Vincke has some salt for the wound: "It's something you all would have liked"

Baldur's Gate 3 screenshot showing Withers, a mummified corpse-like man with gray features and golden adornments.

The canceled Baldur's Gate 3 DLC was playable when Larian canned it, and as if that weren't bad enough, director Swen Vincke says he knows we would've liked it.

Speaking to PC Gamer, Vincke says that because Larian was hot off having finished the base game, it "actually went pretty fast" when it came to making the expansion. "The production machine was still warm," Vincke explains. "You could already play stuff." That stuff, he says, was "something that you all would have liked, I think. I'm sure, actually."

The problem, however, is that Larian quickly got tired with it. "You played it and you looked at it, and [...], 'we'll probably have to redo it ten times.' And do we really want to do this for the next three years?"

Originally, Larian thought it might squeeze out an expansion in one year, but then that became something that was "not going to happen." Instead, it was likely to take three years, and Vincke says that "having just done six years of D&D, which is not our own thing, are we really going to spend all this time on this and abandon our own plans?" Perhaps not for an "add-on," he says, "but maybe BG4?"

So Larian thought about making Baldur's Gate 4, using the ideas it had dropped from the expansion - only to find itself back in the same place. "Another X amount of years, same thing, exactly the same mechanics, same problems that we already solved, just evolving them. And then you start looking at the other things that you had planned and pushing them back, and then you've come back to your senses, because by then the vulnerability is gone."

While being told that a full-fledged Baldur's Gate 3 expansion was in touching distance is a bit of a bitter pill, this is perhaps the clearest reasoning Larian has offered as to why it decided not to pursue the project further. A studio that always strives to push itself forward was unlikely to thrive if it didn't feel motivated by solving the problems that would have come with the expansion or the sequel. Vincke has previously described the "elated faces" he saw when the team learned it was moving on, which isn't really the attitude you want at the start of a new project. 

We still don't know much about the two new RPG projects that Larian is working on instead of those Baldur's Gate follow-ups, but it's clear there's some real excitement, especially as the studio staffs up to 500 developers.

Baldur's Gate 3 investigator says Larian "neutered" one of the RPG's major factions, stopping its NPCs from using their "most important" D&D class feature.