Was Baldur’s Gate 3 Really The Best Game Of 2023? Retrospective

Baldur’s Gate 3 might seem like the obvious choice for the best game of 2023 (and it was The Game Awards’ GOTY), but claiming the throne of a major industry’s yearly output is no simple feat. 2023 was full of excellent titles, with games like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Marvel’s Spider-Man, and Alan Wake 2 receiving glowing reviews from critics and fans alike. Taking a closer look at the situation helps clarify just how strong the argument for Baldur’s Gate 3 is and whether it can really comfortably rest at the top.

Despite the impressive promise that it showed in early access, Baldur’s Gate 3 was something of a dark horse when it came to garnering sales and acclaim. Following in the footsteps of a series that had been dormant for over two decades, the game stepped into a niche genre and asked players for a potentially enormous investment of time to see its story through. Although there was never much doubt that it would do at least reasonably well within its market, it shattered expectations by taking the general gaming world by storm and making characters like Shadowheart and Astarion hot conversation topics for months.

The Scale Of Baldur’s Gate 3 Is Mind-Blowing

If there’s one easy argument for awarding Baldur’s Gate 3 the title of 2023’s best game, it’s the incredible scope of what developer Larian Studios was able to pull off. Building a huge RPG story with countless branching paths is an enormous task for any title, although it’s a road that many games have gone down before. Doing it with full voice acting, flagship graphics, complex systems for reactivity, and painstaking attention to detail in general is another level of challenge, and seeing the finished result makes it hard to even imagine how much work must have gone into the experience.

Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t the only game of an impressive scale from 2023, with Starfield‘s boast of over 1,000 planets serving as an obvious alternative, but the amount of genuinely bespoke content BG3 packs in is hard to rival. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom might have the best claim to a similarly memorable breadth and variety of content, although the novelty is slightly dampened by its similarities with Breath of the Wild. Both are widely considered to be fantastic, but reusing the setting and core elements makes Tears of the Kingdom familiar in spite of its own innovations.

2023 Was A Great Year For Video Game Stories

Among the widespread areas where Baldur’s Gate 3 finds success, the writing is the one that might stand out the most. Memorable characters, complex situations, and engaging story beats flesh out a deeply engaging take on the Dungeons & Dragons setting of Faerûn, managing to carve out a striking niche for something that could have easily been dismissed as generic fantasy. It’s also an exceptionally funny game, successfully capturing the humor of DnD without losing the believability of its world.

That being said, Baldur’s Gate 3 wasn’t the only major title to tell an excellent story. Alan Wake 2 takes developer Remedy’s Entertainment’s penchant for playing with the form to the next level, making for a fascinating story told uniquely. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty both went in more interesting directions than their predecessors. Per usual, the indie scene (and the dubiously indie Dave the Diver) didn’t slack in this regard, with A Space for the Unbound serving as one standout.

Baldur’s Gate 3 Had A Rocky Launch

Although the launch of Baldur’s Gate 3 was met with widespread enthusiasm, the exceptional merits of the game did the heavy lifting in minimizing discussion of its issues. Despite a long period of development and early access, the game was released with an impressive variety of bugs and inconsistencies. It’s hard to put too much blame on Larian Studios, as the scale of the game invites opportunities for problems to arise, but anyone playing in August could likely recount some unusual NPC behaviors or frustrating crashes.

Although the game still isn’t perfect, Larian has taken incredible strides to make up for the rocky launch, with frequent patches each containing hundreds of fixes and quality-of-life improvements. It was also never in a state as bad as, say, the first days of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor‘s PC port, which made another of the year’s best titles unplayable for many. Even so, it’s hard to argue that Baldur’s Gate isn’t a better game in 2024 than it was in most of 2023, and anyone who took their time with the title probably had a much better experience in BG3‘s buggy third act than its most dedicated players at launch.

Baldur’s Gate 3 Earns The Title Of The Best

Naming any one experience “the best” is a bit of a losing game, as individual preferences and unique advantages make it impossible for any kind of objective standard. If any game from 2023 ought to earn the title, however, it’s Baldur’s Gate 3, which was awarded Screen Rant‘s 2023 Game of the Year award. Even at its roughest points, Baldur’s Gate 3 attracted an enormous amount of interest because of how innately compelling it is, and Larian’s labor of love in continually improving the game has gone a long way in smoothing over any qualms. While many of the year’s best games put new polish on familiar experiences, Baldur’s Gate 3 reaches for the stars with an audacity that can’t be ignored.

Longevity is also a key part of being the best, as many games that were considered great at the time of their release ended up somewhat forgotten in the long run. Although it’s impossible to say what titles will be remembered in ten years, Baldur’s Gate 3 has as good of a shot as can be imagined. It doesn’t seem likely that other RPGs will manage a similar scope with the same quality standard anytime soon, making a strong argument for staying power. Only time will tell if Baldur’s Gate 3 goes down in history as 2023’s best game, but for now, it might just be the best answer out there.