In case you missed it, Baldur’s Gate 3 has left early access and is available now on PC. Thus far, it’s reached a peak concurrent player count of 814,666 on Steam, becoming the second-biggest launch on the platform for the year. Of course, even with a 75 to 100-hour campaign with heaps of replay value, one has to ask: Expansion?
PC Gamer interviewed Larian Studios CEO and game director Swen Vincke about the same. He responded, “Honestly, we haven’t started on an expansion”, and noted that it would be “very hard” to create one that encompasses the level 12 to 20 experience.
“[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.”
An expansion would also have to consider all the different decisions made during the base campaign into account as a jumping-off point. Vincke said that developing that means waiting for a “long time,” but while the studio isn’t working on the same, that doesn’t mean it could never happen.
For now, the team is working on updates and patches for Baldur’s Gate 3, with its first hotfix going live last week. It’s also releasing the PS5 version on September 6th. Stay tuned for more details and check out our review here.
