Speaking to the Dungeons & Dragons YouTube channel, Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke admitted that the developers feared some low scores for Baldur's Gate 3 due to potential bugs encountered by reviewers. This explains why review codes were only sent a handful of days before the PC launch.
We were worried, like, they're gonna score it six out of ten, seven out of ten. There's going to be a bug, something's going to happen, it's going to break down, everybody's going to hate it. So that was literally our mentality going in, knowing that the content was good, but we were afraid of that. That was the thing that frightened us the most because it's a very big game, and so we know that stuff can go wrong, although the game usually finds a way of settling back on its feet.
So, we didn't expect it to go this well. I mean, we didn't expect that players were going to react so strongly to it. But I guess the one thing we did know is that everybody who played Baldur's Gate 3 had a different story and that's the most important thing, I think. When people started talking about it, they all realized my adventure is different than your adventure, which is as it should be, right? And so I think that's been very critical to it, and I'm happy that people are appreciating Baldur's Gate 3 the way that it is because we put a lot of effort into it.
Truth be told, the game does have quite a lot of bugs, although Larian has steadily worked on fixing them with several hotfixes and updates. The last patch attempted to improve the game's disappointing performance in Act 3, though even more improvements are on the horizon, according to Larian's Director of Publishing Michael Douse.
Despite some technical shortcomings, Baldur's Gate 3 won the hearts and minds of many gamers, including critics. Larian hasn't shared official sales figures yet, but the Belgian Embassy said the game had sold over 5.2 million units (including early access) on Steam alone as of three weeks ago, and that didn't count GOG or the newly released PlayStation 5 version. With the Xbox version also planned to launch later this year, sales are undoubtedly going to be more than healthy for the studio.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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