"You already said that we are a little bit masochistic"

Image credit: Larian Studios

I'm not saying you've got to be making a vaguely Mass Effecty RPG starting with Ex to be considered as a successor to Larian on the Baldur's Gate series, but it certainly doesn't seem to hurt. Exodus devs Archetype Entertainment were offered such a chance according to former studio head James Ohlen, and while The Expanse: Osiris Reborn devs Owlcat might not have been yet, their co-founder has said it would be a "great honour" if they were.

Owlcat Alexander Mishulin was asked about the idea of taking on BG4 in an interview with IGN, seemingly one of a couple around the studio's 10th birthday. "First of all, I would like to thank all the players, all your audience that consider us to be able to do that," he responded. "It's a really great honour. You already said that we are a little bit masochistic. So yeah, we will consider it a great challenge!"

That assertion comes as Owlcat, developers of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, have reportedly beefed up their staff to around 600 people as they tackle two games. One is The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, the sci-fi RPG I alluded to in the intro, and the other is Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy.

Owlcat were originally founded in Russia, though they've since moved abroad to Cyprus and Armenia. As with a lot of Russian-founded studios, the developers have come under scrutiny for their stance toward and alleged business links with Russia's war on Ukraine. In particular, a couple of Owlcat staff have been accused of posting racial slurs about Ukrainians, and of doing recruitment work in the occupied territory of Crimea. You can read Owlcat's response to those two claims in Edwin's article about The Expanse: Osiris Reborn from April.

Mishulin was clear in these recent interviews that The Expanse isn't a sign the studio are moving away from CRPGs in the future. "We will continue to make CRPGs because we love them," he told PCGamesN. "We do not want to become stagnant. We will be trying different approaches for our RPG games, trying to find the best possible fit for the idea of the game."

Given they've already got at least two big games in the works, Owlcat don't seem in an ideal place to take on a Baldur's Gate 4, even if they were offered it by Hasbro, regardless of how suited they might be to the task. The daunting nature of taking on such a project while also trying to do something ambitious and Mass Effecty was one of the reasons Archetype passed on the opportunity, according to Ohlen. Unless one or both of The Expanse or Dark Heresy are dropped, I can't see Owlcat having the bandwidth to release a BG4 that can step out of BG3's massive shadow any time soon.

Still, perhaps they'll become a candidate if the task of following up Larian's entry gets pushed even further down the road by a Hasbro who are currently scaling back their in-house development efforts.