As the video game community knows very well, there are times when video game developers and publishers set unrealistic expectations for their titles. They’ll set basic expectations about what they “need to sell,” which is usually fair. But then, some teams have “high expectations,” and when the game doesn’t reach them, they’ll say it “underperformed” even though it really didn’t. For the team at Larian Studios, they spent years with Baldur’s Gate 3 in Steam Early Access and had players helping them figure out what to fix and how to make the game better for when it finally launched.
The Larian squad legitimately wondered if all the players that helped them on Steam would be their “peak” and that they wouldn’t do more than that throughout the game’s launch. Instead, when the game went live, they had over 800,000 concurrent players at once, and that number held for quite some time. That number was so high that it was already rising through the ranks of Steam records for such matters.
Larian founder Swen Vincke would be the first to tell you that he was very nervous when the team finally launched the game, but when he saw all the players that were diving in, he had a different thought:
“God, I hope there’s no big bug left,” he noted to PCGamer in an interview before adding, “I don’t want to have that anger over me, but it’s part of the risk of making these very large RPGs.”
He’s not wrong. There have been many big AAA games, including some that were RPGs or RPG-like, that had major issues either on the visual or gameplay side of things. But by all accounts, aside from a few bugs that did manage to slip through, Baldur’s Gate 3 has been a clean and fun game that gamers can’t get enough of.
That led to Vincke and many others in the dev team “smiling happily” as they reveled in their success.
The internet has been filled with people not only talking about the game but posting pictures of their characters and other things they’ve done in it. Some are already calling it a Game of the Year contender, and some feel it could win it!
But the biggest thing is that many people praise how Larian handled the development. They didn’t rush it out, they ensured it had as few bugs as possible, and they worked with the gaming community to make everything as fun as possible. That’s how it should be done.
