No surprises here. Baldur’s Gate 3 is the best game of the year. For the rest of the awards, visit our Game of the Year 2023 list.
Phil Savage, UK Editor-in-Chief: It wasn’t even close. Of the 26 people who submitted nominations for our GOTY awards this year, 23 of them included Baldur’s Gate 3. That’s unprecedented. Larian’s RPG captured the PCG team’s imagination like no other game in the last decade.
Fraser Brown, Online Editor: BG3 is probably my all-time fave. I gave it the highest score I’ve ever slapped on a game during my time at PCG—97%—and playing it again I’ve only found more things to love. The ingenious, complex systems keep spitting out surprises, and countless compelling story beats are hidden away for second, third, and fourth playthroughs. It’s so impossibly rich and detailed, and so much care has been taken with the characters, that I find it hard to envision a game that could top this.
Robert Jones, Print Editor: Simply put, the fantasy RPG of the decade. What Larian Studios achieved with Baldur’s Gate III is incredibly, monumentally special and, honestly, something so rare and magical that I wouldn’t be surprised if it took another two decades or more for such an order of magnitude shift in what is thought possible in RPGs to happen again.
As someone who played the original two Baldur’s Gate games when they originally released, I’d written this series off in my mind over the past 20 years as something sadly lost to the past, so it was genuinely moving to not just jump back into its world once more and to be reacquainted with characters I never thought I’d see again, but to do so and have a gaming experience that had literally never been delivered before. Baldur’s Gate III represents the soul of PC gaming, something evidenced by its record-breaking review score, and for me was always going to be Game of the Year.
Ted Litchfield, Associate Editor: In the lead-up to Baldur’s Gate 3, we talked about the promise of RPG replayability and how it never seemed to quite hold up—I like all the choices I made in Mass Effect, I think I’ll just make them again when I’ve got a hankerin’ to replay it! Could Baldur’s Gate 3 really get people coming back to such a long game, committing to new, crazy play styles for 80 hours at a time?
Well, I’m hooked. I am desperately restraining myself from going back in to try out the disgusting bard/thief or paladin/warlock multiclass builds that have set my brain on fire. I sunk nearly 200 hours into BG3 in a month and a half, and I need to give it some time before I dive back in. I tell myself I’m waiting for a Divinity-style Definitive Edition, right now merely a twinkle in Swen Vincke’s eye.
Jody Macgregor, Weekend Editor: Baldur’s Gate 3 feels more D&D than most other D&D videogames. The heroes of variously questionable morality who all act like protagonists of their own stories, the scrounging for bonuses to die rolls (turns out we all abuse the Guidance spell), and the way each turn-based battle feels like a significant investment of time and resources gave me regular flashbacks to games I’ve played at the table.
Where other RPGs treat fights like speedbumps to spread out between stages of a quest, almost every battle in Baldur’s Gate 3 felt considered. Even fighting goblins meant dealing with ambushes from elevation, alarms drawing in reinforcements, and other complications. The kind of tactics other RPGs demand in boss fights were needed across the board. That meant avoiding a fight by talking my way out of it or doing something clever didn’t feel like I’d just denied myself some loot, but like I’d won a different kind of victory.
I don’t expect other RPGs to recreate the motion-capture conversations of Baldur’s Gate 3 or the rare chemistry of its wonderful cast, but I’m already finding their reliance on endless filler combat unforgivable.
Robin Valentine, Senior Editor: When we came to picking our Game of the Year, there was basically no debate—it was Baldur’s Gate 3 in a landslide. I suspect it’ll be the same at many other outlets. Any way you slice it, that is bizarre. In 2023, an unapologetically old school, fiddly, complicated CRPG is going to sweep the awards. Who could have seen that coming?
What a testament to the incredible work Larian has done here. Like Disco Elysium before it, Baldur’s Gate 3 has broken through on the pure merits of being an RPG experience that is so clever and so rich that it’s just irresistible. Where it takes things a step further than even DE is its incredible scale—it’s so impossibly dense and reactive that even now the community is still discovering unexpected interactions and strange choices the game is ready and willing to account for. We’ve truly never seen an RPG sandbox this deep—it feels like the kind of dream go-anywhere-do-anything fantasy game I imagined in my head as a D&D-addled child, not something that can actually exist in the real world.
In a year full of huge releases from well-established, iconic studios, no one could even get close to the cultural impact of Baldur’s Gate 3, and you really just have to marvel at that. There are going to be shockwaves to this one—frankly I still can’t believe that I’m saying a top-down D&D game is going to wind up being one of the most influential games of the decade, but there’s no denying it. Any developer who isn’t taking a long hard look at BG3 right now is going to wish they had in a few years.