Yesterday the long-awaited release of the final version of Baldur’s Gate 3 finally took place. Let’s remember that the third title of this mythical saga was produced at E3 in 2019, so around four years have passed, a reasonable period of time, since we already know how long it takes to develop a game these days. And, in this case, Larian Studios was risking the prestige obtained, many years ago, by the first two titles in the saga, which left us such a good memory at the time.
At the beginning of 2020, a teaser told us part of what we could expect, but what was really revealing, which happened very soon after, was the announcement that Baldur’s Gate 3 would arrive that same year on Steam in early access mode. It was undoubtedly a surprising decision, since early access is much more common in the ecosystem of humbler developments than in that of large releases. Definitely, Larian Studios adopted a different strategy that now, in view of the data, seems to have worked..
As a curious note, some people have been surprised to learn that the release of Baldur’s Gate 3 happened yesterday, since the game has been available in early access since October 2020, which has caused those people to have forgotten that it was in Early Access. So much time like this, of course, has allowed the study to have compiled a huge amount of feedback from users and, of course, that they have used it to polish it profusely.
Thus, when barely 24 hours have passed since its launch, Baldur’s Gate 3 already has exceptional numbers and ratings. Regarding the evaluation, as we can see on its Steam page, the general reviews (that is, those of all the time since it was launched in early access) showed an average of very positive, with a total of 78,220), but it is that if we look at the most recent, to focus on what happened with its launch, we see that the average has risen to extremely positive, out of a total of 22,014 ratings.
As for Metacritic, we have not yet found user ratings, but we see that the average rating of professional ratings reaches 94 out of 100. And yes, it is true that without user data this rating may raise some doubt, but if we have it Taking into account together with the Steam ratings, which are exclusively from users, the conclusion we can reach is that we are facing one of the best releases of the year.
This is also reinforced by the number of users who are playing it. Thus, if yesterday Thursday the number of concurrent users was close to half a million, today we can see in SteamDB that this mark has already been exceeded and that, in fact, that the maximum peak has not stopped growing during the last hours (at the time of writing this news it has reached 584,973), so we can expect that in a few hours the maximum will be established above 600,000… and that is while waiting for the data from its first weekend, which will improve the brand.
This 2023 is turning out to be particularly disappointing in terms of game releases, with supposed final versions that look more like early betas. However, the model used by Larian Studios with Baldur’s Gate 3, involving the community practically from the beginning with the early access mode, has allowed the arrival of its final version to have, without a doubt, lived up to both the expectations as of the saga of which it is a part. A 10 for Larian Studios and for Baldur’s Gate 3, many others could take an example.
