Baldur’s Gate 3 is a giant game, bigger than we all expected, and will definitely be worth the wait for everyone.
As reported by PSU, Larian Studios creative director Swen Vincke revealed that it will take 200 hours to play and complete everything.
If you think you’ll be satisfied playing through the main story campaign, that will take between 75 to 100 hours, of course still a hefty amount of game to play through.
Swen also believes that there will be fans who will actually go through the trouble of playing the game multiple times.
“I think people will re-roll a lot. We have this insane amount of classes, sub-classes, races, sub-races. This is not a small game you’re going to be done with in a month.
You will be playing it in bits and chunks. Maybe you will drop in with a friend in multiplayer — we have drop-in/drop-out multiplayer also. There are so many ways of playing it.”
Well, maybe they won’t finish the game multiple times, given the time commitment. But for those fans who are hardcore Larian followers, and would play a single game from them for years, this is as satisfying news as you can get.
We got a small hint of how big Baldur’s Gate 3 is a few days ago as well. When Swen talked about making the Xbox Series X|S version of the game, he elaborated on how the complexity of bringing a game of that scale was particularly challenging to deliver on Xbox Series S.
Now Larian had never said that making the port would be impossible or prohibitively difficult. But their desire to bring the game out to all platforms at the same time was stymied by these particular development challenges.
With all that said, 200 hours is the same scale that we are looking at for games like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Elden Ring. This was definitely a serious time commitment and effort from Larian Studios, and it sounds like they set out to make one of the most noteworthy games, not only of 2023, but for this entire gaming generation. You have to respect ambition like that.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is now planned for release on PC with Windows and MacOS on August 2, 2023, and then on PlayStation 5 on September 6, 2023. An Xbox Series X|S version is also in development, but has no release date yet.
