After the game’s existence was hinted at months ago and all but confirmed via website source scouring last week, Larian Studios officially announced that it is working on Baldur’s Gate III today, nearly 19 years after the release of BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate II.

If you recognize the Belgian Larian Studios name, it’s probably because of the Divinity series of computer RPGs, reborn in recent years as the critically and commercially successful Divinity: Original Sin series.

The Larian team is also working “in close collaboration with the Dungeons & Dragons team at Wizards of the Coast,” according to a press release.

Baldur’s Gate III will push the boundaries of the RPG genre and offer a rich narrative with unparalleled player freedom, high-stakes decisions, unique companion characters, and memorable combat. It is Larian Studios’ biggest production ever and will be playable together with friends or as a single-player adventure.

While the game’s first pre-rendered trailer premiered as part of Google’s Stadia pricing announcements today, Larian has since confirmed that the game will also be coming to Windows PCs. The timeline for the game’s release is still anyone’s guess, though Larian says it “plans to work closely with the global community to bring the coveted series to life, with more news to follow over the course of the year.”

In an interview with USGamer conducted before the announcement, Larian creative director Swen Vincke emphasized that the new sequel would be more streamlined than previous games, thanks in part to the easier-to-explain fifth-edition Dungeons & Dragons rules that form its basis. He also stressed that the game, which takes place 100 years after the original game, would be “starting clean” to some extent, with only “iconic” callbacks to the original.

Perhaps most surprisingly, Vincke suggested in the interview that Baldur’s Gate III might not have the same isometric perspective as the titles that preceded it (and which characterizes games like Divinity: Original Sin). “We’re going to have some things that you haven’t seen yet in CRPGs, which I would love to talk about, but I’m going to hold it,” Vincke said on that score.

Listing image by Larian Studios

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1518009