Baldur’s Gate 3 just released on Xbox Series X|S without a word from Larian Studios. The game silently dropped on the Xbox Store during The Game Awards where the RPG won several awards, including Game of the Year (though GameSpot gave Baldur’s Gate 3 Game of the Year first!).
As it turns out, this was intended to be revealed during The Game Awards, as Larian’s Swen Vincke was supposed to announce the news on stage if the game won any awards (of which it received several). But as he shared on X/Twitter, he simply forgot. “I had one job and that was to announce this if we won an award – sorry all but happy it’s out there!” he wrote.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is the long-awaited sequel in the classic Dungeons & Dragons-inspired RPG series. It initially launched in early access on PC before fully launching on that platform and PS5 earlier this year. The full game received widespread critical acclaim for the breadth of its role-playing and storytelling possibilities as well as how it translated the D&D 5e combat system into video game form.
In GameSpot’s Baldur’s Gate 3 review, Jake Dekker gave the game a 10/10, writing, “The freedom that [Baldur’s Gate 3] offers is unprecedented, and it takes a little while to really see the scope of what that means for the game. At times, the sheer number of choices and consequences can be overwhelming. But before long, it becomes apparent that Baldur’s Gate 3 allows players to be the authors of their own destinies in a way no other game has before.”
Despite its massive sales numbers–Baldur’s Gate 3 had over 800,000 PC players just days after it launched–some didn’t anticipate such a success. Microsoft estimated it would have been able to get Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox Game Pass for a fairly low price, but this obviously hasn’t happened.
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