We erred on the side of caution and didn’t include Baldur’s Gate 3 in our most anticipated RPGs of 2022 post. Unfortunately, the game’s creator, Larian Studios, confirmed our prediction when it announced that the game will be released from early access in 2023.
Early Access continues to be a key part of Larian’s development process, allowing us to iterate and improve with feedback from our players to make the best game possible.
Our internal goal post for release is a quality bar rather than a date. A ton of progress has been made towards that quality bar over the past year in Early Access, but we know many players are waiting for an actual date. That date will come when we’re even closer to meeting our goal, but right now our expectation is that Baldur’s Gate 3 will release out of Early Access in 2023.
Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke spoke with Eurogamer separately, stating that the studio estimates Baldur’s Gate 3 will take an additional year to complete.
We think we’re in our last year of development. We do still think we have a year of development ahead of us, so it’s unlikely it will be this year. But we are at the end, so we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel now. We have a pretty concrete plan.
The upside of this last remark is that, if we extrapolate a little, we may see the game launching as early as 2023. In the meantime, PC and Stadia owners of Baldur’s Gate 3 can now play as Barbarians in the early access edition of the RPG. Larian also improved stealth and exploration, redesigned the User Interface (UI), and added a whopping 24 new magic items to the loot table.
Before the actual release, Larian will most certainly update the game at least once, if not twice more. Stay tuned for those patch notes when they arrive.