Highlights
- Playing epic open-world RPGs is a serious undertaking that requires time and dedication, making it difficult to play more than one game simultaneously.
- The release dates of Baldur's Gate 3 and Starfield were strategically planned to avoid competition, allowing players to fully immerse themselves in both games.
- Starfield may face challenges on PC due to the popularity and anticipation surrounding Baldur's Gate 3, but its availability on Xbox with Game Pass gives it an advantage. Ultimately, each player will have to make a choice between the two games.
It’s not often that an epic, endlessly deep RPG gets released that threatens to consume our entire being for the next several months—there was The Witcher 3 in 2015, Skyrim in 2011, Elden Ring last year. The rarity of that grand RPG experience is part of what makes it special. It’s something that requires legitimate preparation: forewarning your friends that you may be a ‘bit busy for a while,’ figuring out if you can blag some sick days off work, stockpiling cans of beans in the larder, and setting keyword alerts for takeaway voucher codes.
I still remember the joy in getting to play the PS3 version of Oblivion on my parents’ massive TV in 2008 when I housesat for them for the summer. I remember dropping my social life when Skyrim released in 2011, conveniently being able to blame the cold November weather for my sudden disappearance. One of my fondest memories of the pandemic lockdown, meanwhile, was playing through the entirety of Divinity: Original Sin 2 with my girlfriend.
Games like this are a serious undertaking for me, and I don’t think I ever had the time (or even desire) in my life to play more than one epic open-world RPG simultaneously. I get so embroiled in the world, so caught up in the relationships and builds and dalliances and main quests and side-quests, that I feel like my attention and enjoyment gets diluted if I try to play another similar game concurrently.
What, I’m going to be pushing goblins off of cliffs and cavorting with vampires one minute, then exploring the cosmos with my biggest fan the next? No, something about that setup just doesn’t work for me. When I’m playing a grand RPG, I pad the rest of my gaming time out with indie games, retro games, games I’ve already completed, that kinda thing, not a parallel universe of deep roleplaying goodness.
Yes, there’s only room for one grand RPG adventure in my life I’m afraid, and between Starfield, out in a few weeks, and Baldur’s Gate 3, out in a few days, it’s going to be the latter. This isn’t some silly platform-based ‘culture war’ thing—because as a PC owner with Game Pass, I will actually have access to both games.
It was a shrewd move of Larian to push the release date for the Baldur’s Gate 3 PC version forward, so it’s now coming out about five weeks ahead of Starfield, rather than just one. It gives the game far more time to get its hooks in, more time for cautious buyers to read some reviews before committing to it, and decreases the chances of people having to decide between one and the other. Now, that could work to both games’ advantage technically, but I’m expecting the Baldur’s Gate 3 wave to still very much be cresting by the time Starfield rolls around.
Of course, there’ll be those eager beavers out there who smash through Baldur’s Gate 3 in a month just in time for Starfield, but for me a grand RPG like this is the backing track to my life for four, five, six months. It’s something to savour, not to crunch, which is largely why I elected not to review the game even though it’s my most anticipated game in years (and with review codes being made available a mere week before release, I’m really not regretting that decision).
That’s not to say I’m dismissing Starfield completely. Courtesy of coming Day One to Game Pass, Bethesda’s cosmic epic partly circumvents the issue of players having to decide whether they’re going to spend their time and money on one game or the other. I have Game Pass myself, so of course I’m going to be dipping in and zipping around Starfield’s largely lifeless cosmos and seeing what’s up.
I’ve always loved that ambling feeling of anonymity and possibilities that Bethesda’s worlds offer—I know it’s a different offering to Baldur’s Gate’s more intimate party-based vibes—but if Starfield is anything like their past games (which, I mean, it clearly is), then to fully get into that zone and embrace the adventure, I need time; time that I know I won’t have because of Baldur’s Gate 3.
I can genuinely see Starfield suffering a bit on PC because of Baldur’s Gate 3, which exists in this weird liminal space where I’m not sure people realise just how big and popular a game this might be come launch time. The fact that it’s been out in Early Access for years has somewhat diluted that grand monolithic buildup to its release day that Starfield’s got to enjoy, but make no mistake, this is going to be a commercially huge game.
Starfield does have some things going for it though (beyond the simple fact that some people prefer spaceships and aliens to owlbears and orcs). By the sheer fluke of Xbox Series’ hardware struggling to handle Baldur’s Gate 3’s split-screen co-op feature, the game’s been pushed back to an unconfirmed date, which means that on Xbox at least players won’t be faced with that dilemma. And with many Xbox players having Game Pass, Starfield has got that system pretty much locked down, so there should be a comfortable bit of breathing room before Baldur’s Gate 3 arrives on Phil Spencer’s green machine.
Sure, I’ll get round to Starfield eventually, but I know I’m not the only one who has that ‘one at a time’ relationship with RPGs like this, which really don’t come around that often (it’s been six years since Larian’s last single-player epic, eight since Bethesda’s). In a way, it’s nice to be spoiled for choice, but the flipside is that a choice has to be made, and for me there was only ever going to be one winner.