Baldur’s Gate 3 is having a runaway success that far surpasses even Larian’s own expectations if we have to believe CEO Swen Vincke’s statement that he would have been content with 100K concurrent users on Steam whereas the game peaked at over eight times that much last Sunday.
Ordinarily, that would mean a Baldur’s Gate 3 expansion or DLC is a given, but that’s likely not going to be the case here. Speaking to PC Gamer, Vincke explained that the studio hasn’t started work on an expansion, and he also listed many drawbacks of such an endeavor, including the difficulty of creating an adventure for high-level characters.
Level 12-20 adventures require a different way of doing things in terms of antagonists you’re going to have to deal with, which require a lot of development to do them properly. Which would make this much more than an expansion in terms of development effort. A lot of D&D adventures are sub-level 12 for precisely that reason. So it sounds like neat, easy expansion material until you start thinking about it, and it’s not as easy as one would imagine.
I know what we want to make, and the team also knows where we’re heading. We’ll see where that lands. I’ve learned in the past you need to be careful announcing things before they’re ready because sometimes you have to cancel them because they don’t work out. We could work on a Baldur’s Gate 3 expansion and it could be boring, and we should stop working on it. Because if we would continue on something that’s boring, we would then have to sell it to you, and then we’d have to say ‘here’s a boring thing, and we want you to buy it.’ That would not be cool. So we have to have the freedom to experiment and do our stuff. And then, when we’re ready to announce it, we will.
Vincke had previously expressed to desire to do something smaller next. It is unclear whether a Baldur’s Gate 3 expansion would qualify under that category, given that he just described it as a major effort.
The PC Gamer interview also teases that mod support for the game will improve ‘dramatically’ after Larian releases the game’s PlayStation 5 version on September 6th. That could be a hint to the release of full-fledged modding tools, which would be an exciting development.
Still, even on their own, modders are creating amazing things. Today, for instance, Nexus Mods user Feriat111 uploaded a Tactician Plus mod that makes the game even harder than the maximum difficulty. We’ve added it to our list of best Baldur’s Gate 3 mods.
