Highlights
- Developers have been pointing out the atypical conditions under which Baldur's Gate 3 was made, but credit should be given to Larian for their hard-earned success.
- Baldur's Gate 3 should be seen as a tome of game design that future developers can learn from, rather than a benchmark to hold other studios to.
We can’t put an official number on it yet, but by the Hells Baldur’s Gate 3 is good, it’s very good in fact. This doesn’t come as a surprise to me, as a fan of Larian’s past work and as someone who followed the game’s Early Access journey closely (while abstaining from actually playing it). I was so bold as to declare a few days before playing it that Baldur’s Gate 3 would basically reduce Starfield to a bit-part player in my 2023 gaming plans, and some 30 hours in, I stand by that. Sorry, Todd.
But in the understandable excitement around the game, and in the frankly premature reviews trickling out for it among fans and critics alike, I’m already seeing this idea of Baldur’s Gate 3 being a ‘new standard’ for RPGs. ‘THIS is what a game should be’ shouts one reviewer, ‘a new era for RPGs’ declares another, while “gold standard” is being bandied around by both gamers and critics.
Now, calling something one of the greatest games of all time is already a big statement, yet there’s a world of difference between that and framing a game as a quality barometer of how all things in the genre should be, making it something that all future games should be measured against. In fact, the two things are arguably mutually exclusive, because the whole point of being the very best means that you’re way up in the stratosphere above the ‘standard,’ and it’s unrealistic to expect games to meet that standard going forward. Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t some kind of baseline, it’s more like the platonic essence of what an RPG (based on tabletop D&D rules) is.
Even before the game’s release, other devs were discussing how, at the same time as looking forward to Baldur’s Gate 3. A few weeks ago, Xalavier Nelson Jr. (head of Strange Scaffold, the studio behind Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, tweeted:
“As cool as it looks, Baldur’s Gate 3 is not a baseline or standard for what games can be moving forward. It’s an anomaly, much like the other mega-games being made in this era of development.”
Other developers chimed in too, including Obsidian’s Josh Sawyer who said “the conditions under which BG3 was made are atypical… Having the foundation set and the funding to build things on your own terms is invaluable.”
Those are fair comments, given Larian’s privileged position these days, but let’s also not forget that they’ve really earned it. The studio’s been around since 1996, and a few years back I spoke to its head Swen Vincke about the arduous relations it had with various publishers over the years, who were constantly tinkering and forcing Larian to compromise on their vision for the early Divinity games (as I recall, ‘Divine Divinity’ was only called that because the publisher had a weird obsession with alliteration, and it was directed to be a Diablo-like ARPG because the publisher deemed that the ‘in thing’ at the time).
There were times when Larian was on the brink of collapse, and it was only through the new avenue of Kickstarter and crowdfunding that they really were let off the leash creatively and found blockbuster success with the Divinity: Original Sin games. For all intents and purposes, Larian is a self-made phenomenally successful indie studio, but it took them the best part of two decades to get there.
So let’s give credit where it’s due, because Larian have earned the privileged conditions under which they made Baldur’s Gate 3. That, however, doesn’t negate the fact that Baldur’s Gate 3 is a singularly incredible game, not some benchmark by which to hold other studios.
Maybe a more helpful way of describing this imminently monumental game would be to treat it as a tome of game design, a guide that future developers can dip into, learn from, and pick out from among the hundreds of things this game does right.
An RPG doesn’t need to match Baldur’s Gate 3 to still be great, but plenty of RPGs could learn from it. In particular, upcoming RPGs descended from that classic RPG school, such as Obsidian’s Avowed, or Bioware’s Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, should definitely be taking note, but clearly both those games are also doing their own thing, so shouldn’t be held up against a game that at this early stage has a ‘95’ average score on Metacritic. Let’s be reasonable, people!
RPGs are such an unfathomably vast, diverse genre that each time I’ve flirted with writing up a glossary of all the different RPGs, I’ve backed out due to how time-consuming that task would be. Can we really use Baldur’s Gate 3 as a barometer for fellow RPGs like The Witcher 3, or The Elder Scrolls, or fricking Citizen Sleeper? The goals and strengths of all those games are so different that comparisons are absurd.
In reality, the tabletop-inspired design of Baldur’s Gate 3 is only really comparable to the relatively small subset of isometric cRPGs like Divinity, Disco Elysium, the old Infinity Engine games, Obsidian’s efforts like Tyranny and Pillars of Eternity, and a few others. Just as Baldur’s Gate 3 learned from this rich lineage of games—from Fallout’s brilliantly branching questlines to Disco Elysium’s visible dice rolls—so too can future cRPGs learn from Baldur’s Gate 3. It doesn’t need to be 'a new standard’ to join the pantheon of great cRPGS and become something that future games can learn and take inspiration from.