After the stratospheric success of Baldur's Gate 3, Hasbro was naturally keen for a follow-up. The only problem? Larian wasn't interested in doing Baldur's Gate 4. And it turns out the second person Hasbro asked didn't want the job either.
Larian famously decided to move on from Baldur's Gate and get back to working on properties it owned. This wasn't a decision made in haste, either. When the call was made, it was still committed to supporting BG3—netting players DLC-sized updates doled out for free—and it had even started work on Baldur's Gate 4.
Swen Vincke told me that he was "vulnerable" after the launch of BG3, and in that state agreed to make a sequel. "You tend to be prone to do the obvious thing, which was really just make an add-on, or a standalone add-on, or start working on a sequel, because it's the easiest route to take."
Larian even had a partially-playable build up and running. But Vincke realised that Larian would be stuck "doing the same thing" if it continued with Baldur's Gate 4—years of working in someone else's sandbox, iterating, throwing stuff out, early access, everything the studio had just finished. So he spoke to his teams, and they agreed: "We should be looking at how we can do stuff that we get excited about." And Larian's BG4 was no more.
But Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast were lucky enough to have former Baldur's Gate developers on the payroll, working at Archetype Entertainment on Exodus, including both of Baldur's Gate 2's co-lead designers, James Ohlen and Kevin Martens.
It was Ohlen, Archetype's studio boss, who Hasbro turned to.
"The day [Chris Cox, Hasbro CEO] knew they weren't going to do it, he called me. 'Hey James, what do you think about doing Baldur's Gate 4?' And I was like, 'I don't, I would fail, and here's why I would fail.'"
Ohlen thought he'd struggle to achieve what Larian did. It had been the perfect studio for BG3, because it already had all the tools and the people. BG3 was really born out of the work done on Divinity: Original Sin and its sequel.
"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."
BG3 was built in Larian's proprietary engine, so Ohlen would have needed to start from scratch. "We're talking about at least half a decade of horror, building all that stuff." He actually asked Cox if he could get Larian to license out the engine, like Black Isle did with BioWare's Infinity Engine. But even if that had happened, he believes, it would have been too much of a challenge.
Basically: Swen Vincke is too hard to dethrone. "Swen's always going to be the master of building those kinds of things. It's really hard to take him off that throne, just because of everything—the tools, institutional knowledge, team."
Ohlen thinks the best team for the job would be one that throws out the rulebook and does 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."
It definitely sounds like the right choice for Ohlen, as he has since left Archetype, and game development, since Cox made his offer, citing burnout as his main motivation.
The fate of Baldur's Gate 4 remains unknown, but a remaster of Baldur's Gate 2, and likely the original game, is apparently in development, sources tell us. And while Ohlen is no longer working on games, it looks like his former colleague Kevin Martens, the other BG2 lead designer, is on board.
