Baldur’s Gate 3
Get ready to stop everything you’re doing, abandon your loved ones, quit your job, neglect basic hygiene and disappear for a while into the sprawling fantasy world of Baldur’s Gate III.
The game, developed by Larian Studios, the creators of the wonderful Divinity Original Sin RPGs, is apparently very long. Like . . . really, really long.
In an update announcing that the game would be releasing a month early on PC—and a week late onPS5—the studio drops some crazy details on what to expect from the game, including the sheer number of classes, races, spell-combinations, talents and more, all of which far exceed everything in their Divinity games. They also announced a new level cap—12—and a new class, the Monk. I do love to play as a Monk!
But it’s the sheer length of time you’ll need to complete the game that boggles the mind. Note, this isn’t a live-service game like Diablo IV, designed to be played over and over again with seasonal updates and so forth. It’s certainly designed to be played more than once, but it’s fundamentally a traditional RPG, though one you can play with a friend both online or in split-screen (which is awesome). In any case, the game is loaded with content. According to Larian:
- Baldur’s Gate III has more cinematic dialogue than all three Lord Of The Rings novels combined—times three.
- With 174 hours of cinematics, the game’s cutscenes will be over twice the length of the entire series, Game Of Thrones.
- Obviously this gives players a ton of different branching paths to follow based on their choices, so you won’t encounter all of these dialogues or cinematics in one playthrough. A single play-through is said to take somewhere between 75 and 100 hours, depending on how you play.
Whatever the case, that’s a ton of content to explore in a game made by one of my very favorite RPG studios. I’ve played some of it in Early Access, but didn’t want to go too deep in before launch. As much as I love the ability to play games in Early Access, sometimes I just like starting a finished game when it’s ready to play, and not having to start all over, either.
Baldur’s Gate III launches on PC on August 3rd and on PS5 on August 6th. An Xbox version of the game is in development, though no release date has been announced.
