Baldur’s Gate 3 reviews are finally starting to trickle in, and they have been unanimously glowing. So unanimously, in fact, that the game has now taken Tears of the Kingdom’s spot as 2023’s highest-rated game, with a Metacritic score of 97. The game has 18 critic reviews at the time of writing, all above 90, with ten being a full score of 100. It’s not just the highest-rated game of the year, it’s the second-highest-rated PC game of all time right now. Of course, there’s no saying how long this will last – Tears of the Kingdom’s rating is based on 145 critic reviews, and we’ll likely see the score change as more sites post reviews. More importantly, it’s just a review score, and I don’t care about it.
That’s not to detract from Larian’s achievement. Baldur’s Gate 3 is very, very good, and I’ve been playing it almost every day since it came out. I enjoy it more than I’ve enjoyed any RPG in recent history – more than I’ve enjoyed any game in the last few years, really. But the media has written about these high review scores as if they are a triumph, and fans are treating these headlines like undeniable proof that BG3 is the best game of all time. It shows a crucial misunderstanding of review scores that has plagued the industry for a long time, and as someone who reviews games, the attitude people have towards these scores concerns me.
I can’t help but think about that one website that gave Tears of the Kingdom a 6/10, and the outrage that was directed at them as a result. Gamers forget that reviewers are people with their own perspectives and views, and are not meant to represent the voice of the people. There is always a chance that a review will be posted with a score that seems unfairly low to the huge majority of people, especially when it comes to a game with so much hype surrounding it that fans have already decided it’s a 10/10 before they’ve even played it. That doesn’t mean the reviewer is farming for hate clicks or intentionally going against the grain. Their perspective is entirely valid, but the way people talked about it, you would’ve thought they’d brought Link out back of a McDonald’s and executed him.
Review scores don’t mean anything. You can glean an industry consensus from what critics liked or didn’t like about the games, but the scores themselves? Arbitrary. Every site has their own criteria for what each number means, so the scores you see don’t even mean the same thing from site to site. Why put so much emphasis on a Metacritic score, then? I think the critical content of those reviews is far more interesting – what people loved about it, what didn’t work, what they found interesting in terms of developing gaming trends, and how the game bucked trends are all far more important than how many stars a critic chooses to give it. To reduce a critic’s work to crunching numbers is deeply silly when there’s so much more to look at.
Baldur’s Gate 3’s Metacritic score doesn’t matter right now, and it won’t matter tomorrow, or at the end of the year when all the other huge releases get released. It may get higher, or lower, or stay the same, and that doesn’t matter either. The score is made up. What’s real is the rest of the criticism that critics will be writing about this game for the next few weeks and maybe even months. There are more thoughtful ways to engage with video games than waiting for review scores to validate your opinion like you’re rooting for your home team at a football match.