Why BG4 Will Never Be - A Redux

[Pan Darius Cassandra]

This is part of an ongoing conversation I've been having with some BG3 players (so pls, mods, don't delete - it's not an advertisement, it's a discussion about the direction of future game development).

I have contended that BG4 will never get made, at least not by game studios, and certainly not Larian (setting aside their decision not to any further business with Hasbrah), because there isn't time left for them to do so before GenerativeAI is capable of creating entire games for us.

It took Larian six years to build BG3, and that was using an existing game engine.

We are on the cusp of being able to generate games and interactive 3D worlds, in VR if we want, right now. There are lots of preliminary demos/experiments that can almost do it, but are kinda limited in scope and breadth. Some very simple Atari-like games can already be fully generated.

So, can a studio like Larian produce a game like BG4 before GenAI takes over? I'd say no, given their current rate of producing games (six years). However, one could argue that studios will also leverage GenAI to produce games faster, and while I agree that they will attempt this, I'd also point out the futility of it (in a commercial sense) when literally every human on the planet with a computer has access to this technology. Why pay for a game when you could just prompt one into existence?

Anyway, the impetus of this post is the latest eye-popping evidence in support of this argument - sry for the long pre-amble.

BEHOLD! GENIE 2!

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/genie-2-a-large-scale-foundation-world-model/

As an additional aside, over the next 12 business days OpenAI will be either releasing or demo'ing somethimg new every day, and many suspect one of the things they'll be releasing is 'agentic' AI.

For those who aren't familiar, a short anecdote:

Last month, as an experiment, I decided to sunscribe to ChatGPT to see if the o1-preview model could help me build a 3D game engine (tl;dr: close, but not quite). For reference, I really don't have a background in coding or computer science. I'm a cook/chef by trade. 25 yrs ago I tried out Java/HTML and Photoshop/Illustrator in community college, and I aced all my classes, but it just didn't hold my interest, I wasn't passionate about it the way I am about cooking. Point is, that was 25 yrs ago and I barely scratched the surface, I effectively have 'no experience' in coding and am somewhat tech illiterate when it comes to actually using technology (I can't even mod using Larian's mod tools).

So, lomg story slightly shorter, I prompted o1-preview to help me install some free, open source software that I could use to build a coding environment. It did so, and even helped my trouble shoot when I ran into problems. The software was successfully installed.

Then, it began to build up a very primitive 3D game engine. Keep in mind this was nothing like what we'd think of asca "game", it was just a little pyramid I could control with the arrow keys and move it around on a flat plane.

But the point is that I did this without knowing what a single line of code does. All I did was copy/paste code that o1-p gave me and then reported errors/problems to it so it could fix them.

And o1-p is not a proper "agent", it's just a chatbot, it doesn't share my screen and can't take actions or interact with other programs.

What's comimg next year, or if we're lucky, this month, is agentic AI. It will be capable of using the programs on your computer, according to your prompts, and this includes coding environments. This means you'll literally be able to inatruct it to create games for you.

There are other recent advances, like Anthropic's MCP, that will further accelerate this process, but this post is already getting too long.

tl;dr: Game development industry is going to collapse soon as gamedev is "democratized" by generative AI.

Check out Genie 2, it's mindblowing!

[GriffinPilgrim]

Leaving aside the many flaws in your AI shilling; you have posted this same topic so very many times at this point I have to wonder if you're on some AI company's payroll.

[DrZann]

Holy obsession, Batman! I've been gone from these forums for a year and Pan is still shilling for AI. He was predicting that AI would take over the industry by now. I blame Obama.

[TaKo]

Originally posted by GriffinPilgrim:

I have to wonder if you're on some AI company's payroll.

prolly just very gullible and easily impressed

this weirdo has no idea how engines function and very much has no idea of how game development goes

@ anyone who actually cares about "democratizing" game development, indies exist

[アンジェル]

Originally posted by DrZann:

Holy obsession, Batman! I've been gone from these forums for a year and Pan is still shilling for AI. He was predicting that AI would take over the industry by now. I blame Obama.

What has Obama to do with anything about that?

Look at the bright side of things: with trainers like them we can bath safely in the bliss knowing that AI will never manage to surpass humanity.

[DrZann]

Originally posted by アンジェル:

Originally posted by DrZann:

Holy obsession, Batman! I've been gone from these forums for a year and Pan is still shilling for AI. He was predicting that AI would take over the industry by now. I blame Obama.

What has Obama to do with anything about that?

Look at the bright side of things: with trainers like them we can bath safely in the bliss knowing that AI will never manage to surpass humanity.

Obama has his fingers in many pies.

I get the feeling if AI did surpass humanity it would move to another planet and never call or write unless it needed to borrow some money.

[Яeplicant]

Originally posted by DrZann:

Originally posted by アンジェル:

What has Obama to do with anything about that?

Look at the bright side of things: with trainers like them we can bath safely in the bliss knowing that AI will never manage to surpass humanity.

Obama has his fingers in many pies.

I get the feeling if AI did surpass humanity it would move to another planet and never call or write unless it needed to borrow some money.

That's just the plot of Forbidden West. Unsure about the Obama-side of things, though.

[Koala 4peace]

Originally posted by Яeplicant:

Originally posted by DrZann:

Obama has his fingers in many pies.

I get the feeling if AI did surpass humanity it would move to another planet and never call or write unless it needed to borrow some money.

That's just the plot of Forbidden West. Unsure about the Obama-side of things, though.

Obama is also guilty of the plot of Forbidden West. Totally.

[★REM★]

Larian officially said they will not make BG4, months ago.
Who else is capable to do turn based games as good as larian? no one, Larian is the king of the turn based games, always been. Since they won't do BG4 someone else will do , and it will not ever be as good.

[DrZann]

Originally posted by ★REM★:

Larian officially said they will not make BG4, months ago.
Who else is capable to do turn based games as good as larian? no one, Larian is the king of the turn based games, always been. Since they won't do BG4 someone else will do , and it will not ever be as good.

If we really need another Baldur's Gate I hope a new rising star developer takes it on because I don't know any established studios I'd like to see do it. I am excited to see something new come from Larian, though.

[nizzemancer]

Originally posted by Koala 4peace:

Originally posted by Яeplicant:

That's just the plot of Forbidden West. Unsure about the Obama-side of things, though.

Obama is also guilty of the plot of Forbidden West. Totally.

Someone really wants to bring back the "Thanks Obama" meme...

[Captain_Narol]

Larian did an awesome job, but there are other good game companies out there that would sell their soul to do a BG4 hoping for even just a share of the success of BG3 so I'm not worried about the BG future !

Hasbro anyway won't let die their golden goose, so I'm sure they are already in the process of finding another competent studio to develop the next episodes of the license...

AI if used well is not that much of a problem, it can allow the next games to be released faster while leaving more time for the content creators to focus on main stories and fun quests.

So who will make BG4 and will they be up to the task ?

As serious contenders, I see Owlcat Games, Obsidian, Bioware, Harebrained Schemes, Beamdog and maybe even CD Projekt ?

Will be quite a challenge to make a game even as half as good as BG3, but it's not impossible and we can still have hope for decent future sequels !

[Donzaffi]

People that don't know a **** about AI trying to explain the world

[magritte]

Originally posted by Captain_Narol:

So who will make BG4 and will they be up to the task ?

As serious contenders, I see Owlcat Games, Obsidian, Bioware, Harebrained Schemes, Beamdog and maybe even CD Projekt ?

!

My dream would be for Tactical Adventures to do the game mechanics and encounter design and maybe Obsidian to handle writing, graphics, voice acting. Not TA for that stuff, anyway.

[Helios_One]

No BG4 would be a good thing. If only there was no BG3 too

[Captain_Narol]

@Magritte (and ignoring the obvious Troll) :

Indeed I thought too about TA for BG4 as they did a great job with Solasta at least from a mechanical standpoint and with limited ressources, but I think Hasbro will probably want to pick a bigger studio with more credentials for a big project like BG4 would be !