Larian Studios is hyping Baldur’s Gate 3 as an especially long game; one that could take you years to complete.
It’s been nearly three years since Baldur’s Gate 3 launched via early access on Steam, although it only contains the game’s first act, which offers around 25 hours of gameplay.
The full release is scheduled to launch in early August and developer Larian Studios has confirmed that it is up to four times as long, depending on how much you want to do.
A standard playthrough is expected to last anywhere from 75 to 100 hours, but it can potentially exceed 200 hours, and Larian seems prepared for some players to spend years on Baldur’s Gate 3.
‘Between 75 and 100 hours, that’s what we’re seeing,’ says Swen Vicke, head of Larian Studios. ‘That’s not doing everything, that is just going to be a playthrough.’
‘There will be people who will be way over that, the ones who want to do everything. They will probably hit 200 hours, I think,’ he tells IGN.
The promise of Baldur’s Gate 3 being an exceptionally meaty game is sure to excite diehard fans, especially if they’ve been obsessively replaying the first act in early access.
In fact, Vicke sounds confident that players will want to experience more than one playthrough thanks to Baldur’s Gate 3’s replayability.
‘It has an enormous amount of replay because there are so many ways to do things,’ Vicke explains. ‘I think people will re-roll a lot. We have this insane amount of classes, sub-classes, races, sub-races. This is not a small game you’re going to be done within a month.’
This confidence isn’t unfounded as Vicke says the same thing happened with Divinity: Original Sin 2, which a lot of people are still playing today, even six years after it launched.
Looking at that game’s player stats on Steam, there were still approximately 10,000 people playing it just this past weekend.
Vicke also expects some players to take well over a year to get through Baldur’s Gate 3, since they may want to do a purely multiplayer playthrough and treat it like a traditional game of Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
‘People who are going to be playing in multiplayer, they’ll take a year, a year-and-a-half. They will make their regular sessions where they play, like D&D,’ Vicke believes.
That said, Vicke seems to be aware that a potential 200-hour playtime can be overwhelming, which is why he highlight’s Baldur’s Gate 3’s chapter breaks. Transitions from one chunk of the game to the next serve as stopping points, making them ideal spots to put the game down for something else and then pick it back up later.
‘There will be moments where you can say, ‘you know what? I’ll stop here and try something else,’ and then I’ll pick it up again. It’s big enough,’ says Vicke.
Baldur’s Gate 3 launches for PC on August 3 and PlayStation 5 on September 6. An Xbox Series X/S version is in development but may have ‘compromises.’
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