BioWare veteran Mark Darrah explains why Baldur's Gate 3 succeeded by not copying Baldur's Gate 2

Mark Darrah — programmer on the original Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2, and later executive producer of the Dragon Age series through Inquisition — has shared his take on why Baldur's Gate 3 became such a massive hit. Speaking to FRVR, Darrah argues the game's success comes directly from Larian's willingness to do its own thing rather than chase the Infinity Engine formula.

Darrah used Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity as a counterexample. He praised it as a faithful Infinity Engine-style game, but said that faithfulness turned out to be a ceiling: "The reality is that the industry has moved on so much since then that I was like, oh yeah, this is a really faithful adaptation of that and it turns out that I didn't actually want that anymore." Larian, by contrast, brought its own DNA to the project. "They are Baldur's Gate 2 and Baldur's Gate 1-flavoured, but they're also Divine Divinity-flavoured. They are flavoured by their own track record, they are flavoured by what CRPGs have become in the intervening 20 years. So I think it's a great sequel. I think they did what is the right thing to do given that large of a gap."

Baldur's Gate 3 is mechanically much closer to Larian's Divinity: Original Sin games than to the Infinity Engine classics, and that lineage clearly paid off — the game is still one of the most-played titles on Steam nearly three years after launch. The success has created an awkward situation for IP owner Hasbro, which now holds one of gaming's most valuable RPG properties but can't easily find a developer willing to follow Larian's act.

Darrah has a concrete suggestion for that problem: do a Fallout: New Vegas. "Get Larian to agree to license out the Divinity Engine and essentially let someone make an oversized expansion pack for Baldur's Gate 3 and call that Baldur's Gate 4," he said. "That could work." PC Gamer editor Fraser Brown has floated the opposite approach — simply don't make a sequel at all.