When Baldur's Gate 3 bumped up its PC release date to avoid Starfield, it didn't occur to me that Starfield was the game that should be worried. Wes was the most prescient among us at PC Gamer, wondering at the time if Baldur's Gate 3 would be so good that Starfield would suffer from the comparison. We were all excited for it, but who knew that it would be such an enormous mainstream hit?
Not Larian.
"This was not in the books at all," Larian CEO Swen Vincke told us after Baldur's Gate 3 broke 800,000 Steam concurrents just days after launch. "This was way, way beyond what we expected. There's also no precedent for it, for our type of game to have that many people playing concurrently ... Everybody here is very happy."
I definitely didn't predict this kind of success for BG3. I knew I'd be into it, because I liked Divinity: Original Sin 2, and argued for it to win PC Gamer's GOTY award back in 2017. But if I'd mentioned Original Sin at Christmas dinner that year, my family would've been startled by my newfound piousness. Not so with Baldur's Gate 3: Family and friends who I've only ever heard talk about Fortnite or Zelda know about a CRPG that involves mind flayers. It's a new era.
Part of the surprise comes from Baldur's Gate 3 having been available in early access for so long. That shrunk the significance of the launch for me, because surely, I thought, if this were going to be a big phenomenon, someone would've told me.
