Baldur’s Gate 3 has taken the world by storm. Every website is talking about it, it trended on Twitter for almost a week straight after release, and it’s currently the top-selling game on Steam. We at TheGamer haven’t shut up about it either, because there’s just so much to say. Even outside of work, my friends are texting me about it constantly. I cannot escape Baldur’s Gate 3, and I’ve been wondering, would we be hearing this much about the game if its release date hadn’t been pushed up?
Baldur’s Gate 3 was set to launch on August 31, but was moved forward so that we’d “have more time to play it,” according to Larian’s community notes. Many interpreted this as an attempt to avoid launching alongside Starfield, which would release less than a week later on September 6 and is anticipated to be one of the biggest games of the year.
Understandably, Larian wouldn’t have wanted its game to be overshadowed by the behemoth that Starfield is shaping up to be – I, many of my colleagues, and plenty of gamers are expecting Starfield to be the kind of sprawling RPG that sucks people in for months, maybe even rivaling Skyrim’s decade-long legacy. There are so many planets that I’m not even sure how anybody could 100 percent the game’s achievements. Starfield is Xbox’s flagship release, the kind that warranted a 45 minute long direct immediately after the Xbox Games Showcase. It’s a big goddamn deal.
It’s possible Baldur’s Gate 3 wasn’t moved forward because it just so happened to be ready a month in advance – it’s likely that developers had to crunch harder to get the game ready for that earlier release date. Review keys for the game were meant to reach journalists the week before release, but were delayed to mere days before August 3 so Larian had time to polish the final build. That does not indicate that the game was already prepared for release and that the console version was holding them back, it indicates that the developers rushed it for a specific reason. For what it’s worth, Larian claimed in a community note that they were releasing the game on different platforms in order of readiness, promising the PC version would be ready for an August 3 release and delaying the PS5 port to September 6 to ensure it would hit a consistent 60 frames per second.
Baldur’s Gate 3 was not the most anticipated game of the year for most. It definitely wasn’t mine, but I had a passing interest in it. It was word of mouth that got me willing to invest the time and energy into this game that it requires, and from there, my understanding of the game’s depth and intricacy unfurled. I had friends who were talking about it daily before launch, and I thought I might as well see what they’re all talking about. The moment the game officially released, the (entirely warranted) hype cycle began, and Baldur’s Gate 3 completely blew up. Last weekend, more than 25 percent of all playtime on Steam in the US was spent on this one single game. That’s not because of sheer marketing, it’s because people won’t shut up about it.
Imagine if it launched a week before Starfield. People wouldn’t want to start a 100 hour campaign in Baldur’s Gate 3 before embarking on a galactic adventure across Starfield’s 1,000 planets. It’s a gigantic game on its own and will no doubt take long enough to complete that a week’s worth of BG3 gameplay would be a distant memory by the end. Word of mouth would have been disrupted as well, with people likely pivoting completely to the newer, bigger RPG so they can keep up with the hot takes and media coverage.
Starfield is also on Game Pass, which means a whole lot of subscribers jumping in on day one at no extra cost to them. Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t even on Xbox yet, and likely won’t be until 2024. It’s the perfect storm, and it would blanket Baldur’s Gate 3’s hype as quickly as it began. It wouldn’t have been able to build the momentum that’s given it such huge, viral success, and fighting for space alongside Starfield would’ve made it suffer in terms of media coverage.
I want to say it’s clear that moving the release date up was hugely beneficial to Larian when it came to Baldur’s Gate 3’s runaway success, but I’m also vehemently anti-crunch, and Larian founder Swen Vincke admitted as much to Eurogamer in an interview. “We're certainly doing overtime as we're getting close to release,” he said. “Now, definitely, in this last month towards release, things are tenser because it's just a lot of stuff that has to come together, and it's very hard to do that nine-to-five.” He insists that until a couple of months prior to release, “average overtime was ten or twenty minutes”, and that Larian crunched far more on previous games. A game benefitted from a longer hype cycle, more media coverage and a very positive reception, but I think its important to ask if it was worth having employees crunch. I can’t answer that, only Larian’s employees can, but maybe it would be too good to be true if a game we all loved so much was made only under ethical circumstances.