The launch of Baldur’s Gate 3 is getting more complicated by the second, with late review copies and no pre-loads for the PC version.
If you see anyone posting a scored review of Baldur’s Gate 3 this week, we wouldn’t believe a word they say. No one got review copies of the game until Sunday evening and considering the game takes 200 hours to see (more or less) everything nobody’s going to have a chance to review it properly before it’s out.
Not only that but the review embargo is Thursday evening, at the exact same time the game is released, so we can’t even talk about it properly until after many people have bought it.
Although they probably won’t have had a chance to play it by the time the embargo is up, because for some reason pre-loads are not allowed.
We’ve asked developer Larian Studios for an explanation of the review situation and hopefully we’ll be able to update you on Thursday, as to what the reasons are.
The best we can probably hope for though is a review in progress for Friday morning, once we can take stock of where we are so far – although the fact that the game has been in early access for over a year does help a bit.
As for the pre-order situation, there’s also no explanation for that. The game launches at 4pm BST on Thursday and Larian has stated on Steam that there will be no pre-loading before that (implying there will be after launch, if you buy it later).
That’s a real problem, because the game weighs in at a hefty 122GB and that is going to take people with slower broadband speeds a very long time to download.
To make matters worse early access save games will not work with the release version, so you’ll have to start the whole game from scratch. So, it could be days before some players see anything substantially new.
Whether Larian is worried about technical problems is unclear, but the whole situation is very unusual. Especially for a game that is expected to review very well, given previous game Divinity: Original Sin 2 was one of the most critically acclaimed titles of 2017.
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