Larian has made itself very hard to misread. In a response posted on X on July 25, 2026, the studio’s official account wrote: “Maximum hijinks are happening right now, but we’re not involved in any BG3 related projects,” after Dark Horse announced a Karlach comic series and tagged both Larian and Wizards of the Coast in its post.

That is the whole story, fast. The key moment is not a leak or a backchannel. It is a direct attempt to close the loop on a misunderstanding: Dark Horse’s signup for the project included the phrase “With [Larian] and [Wizards of the Coast],” and tagged both companies. In other words, if you were an executive reading that post and doing the normal inference game, it could reasonably look like Larian is participating in a Baldur’s Gate 3 spinoff pipeline. Larian moved to shut that down immediately, and it did it publicly.

So what happened around the edges? Dark Horse’s announcement teased “a yet-untitled comic series starring Karlach, our favorite BG3 companion,” and positioned the project as coming next. Dark Horse signed off the announcement with that “With [Larian] and [Wizards of the Coast]” line and used tags that bring the two companies into the orbit of reader expectations. That matters because Baldur’s Gate 3 is not just a game title. It is a living franchise with brand gravity, and brand gravity tends to create “who’s doing what next” assumptions.

Larian’s response is also notable because the company has already been in the news for stepping away from the most obvious next step. The original source notes that “Ever since Larian revealed that it would not be making Baldur's Gate 4,” there has been a “popular conception” that the split from Wizards of the Coast involved some kind of dispute or grievance. The source adds that Swen Vincke has insisted the split was amicable, and that the developers were “just creatively spent working in someone else's setting.” In that context, this latest exchange is less about comics and more about narrative control, specifically preventing readers from building a storyline where Larian is quietly in the middle of a Wizards-led spinoff while publicly claiming it is done with BG3-related work.

And Larian’s team did not respond with vague corporate fog. The post that includes the “not involved” line also shows CEO Swen Vincke and writing lead Adam Smith doing what the source describes as a script read-through, alongside another message: “As soon as we bust outta here, we'll share more about [Divinity].” That is an unmistakable pivot. Even if people wanted to connect the dots between Larian’s BG3 authorship and whatever Dark Horse is planning next, the studio’s official communication tries to reroute attention away from BG3 spinoffs and back toward its own Divinity world.

From an incentives standpoint, this is exactly the kind of statement studios make when brand ownership and IP partnership interpretation can get messy fast. If Dark Horse is the publisher and Wizards is the D&D owner, Larian’s involvement would imply a partnership that is both commercially meaningful and creatively entangling. Even a small mismatch between who is credited and who is actually doing the work can cause reputational and contractual headaches. The source even points out that some commenters suggested Larian’s writing team may have been collaborating on the comic project before the exchange. Larian’s response is designed to extinguish that assumption while it is still forming.

For decision-makers who track the games-to-media pipeline, the second-order implication is clear: public tagging is not harmless. When an announcement includes “With [Larian] and [Wizards of the Coast]” and tags the accounts, it becomes a quasi-press-release signal. That signal can travel through social media faster than legal fine print, and it can influence everything from fan sentiment to partner perceptions to how future co-marketing opportunities are evaluated.

There is also a strategic angle for anyone allocating attention or capital across fantasy IP. Larian is simultaneously steering away from BG3-related projects and pointing to Divinity as its next platform for focus. The source calls out that Divinity is set in its own fantasy world of Rivellon, and that the studio has a reason to keep its creative lane clean in the public eye.

Bottom line: Larian is not quietly hedging. It is directly telling the market it is “not involved in any BG3 related projects” in connection with this Karlach comic announcement. For execs and boards watching franchise ecosystems, the takeaway is not just “they said no.” It is that when brand expectations get anchored to prior credibility, companies may need to correct the record in real time, because the narrative will otherwise harden into assumptions that are hard to unwind later.