MeinMMO editor Leya can’t believe that Baldur’s Gate 3 will soon celebrate its first birthday. For a year, she has been playing the role-playing game by Larian and she is not alone. How can this be?
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a unicorn in our gaming landscape.
On August 3, the fantasy role-playing game will celebrate its first birthday. Since then, Larian has won numerous awards and is today often referred to as a positive example in an otherwise shattered gaming landscape, where mass layoffs and studio closures dominate the headlines.
Currently, among other things, a screenshot is being discussed on reddit that shows the Steam player counts for Baldur’s Gate 3. This is related to an article on the website Tech4Gamers, which highlights the phenomenon that Baldur’s Gate 3 still manages to reach over 100,000 players daily on Steam.
This screenshot shocked me. Because for a year, I have been one of those players. I can hardly believe that the adventures in Faerûn have fascinated me for so long. I just can’t let go of this damn game!
How is this possible? Baldur’s Gate 3 is a classic, turn-based RPG that you usually play intensely once and then set aside after a few weeks or even months.
For me, three factors are crucial for the fact that the role-playing game is still visited so regularly by so many people:
- Quality
- Replayability
- Community bonding and engagement
The longer you play a game, the more issues and bugs you notice. After now a year in Baldur’s Gate 3, I’m no different. Of course, I see the quests that run into dead ends or that some characters like Astarion have received much more attention than others like Wyll.
However, I am getting closer to the 1000 play hours with ever bigger steps.
Because despite the shortcomings that Baldur’s Gate 3 particularly shows in the last third of the game, it is simply of high quality. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have achieved a Metacritic score of 96.
On this topic, I can recommend a column by our house demon Cortyn. There is a deep analysis in the GameStar Talk:
A hallmark of quality is related to the replayability of Baldur’s Gate 3. It is not an empty promise that you can experience the game in many different ways.
I still remember an interview I had with the lead developer Swen Vincke before the release of Baldur’s Gate 3. We talked about the ultimate evil path and why it is so important to him that the content in his game is of high quality, even if only a very small part of the players gets to see it in the end.
That is exactly what keeps pulling me back into the game. Even when I’m not actively playing, I keep thinking about what would happen if I just did certain things differently. Baldur’s Gate 3 rewards this time and again because I have always been able to find many new dialogues, details, or cinematics.
Baldur’s Gate 3 achieves what service games want
But if Larian has understood one thing, it is the topic of community engagement. Never has it been so easy to connect directly with the community across various platforms and to become a part of it.
Social networks have made classic marketing campaigns almost superfluous. Players involuntarily become part of the marketing by sharing memes or their experiences and simply interacting with each other.
However, to leverage this, one must master the chaos of its dynamics. I am reminded of how players were firmly convinced of a Valentine’s Day patch and were just trolled by Larian with penguin memes.
This is typically only seen in long-running service games, as these games aim to achieve exactly this longevity. This, in turn, can only be successful with a game that provides the foundation through quality and emotional engagement. Without one, the other cannot succeed.
I only truly understood the actual greatness of Baldur’s Gate 3 shortly before the release with the infamous bear sex scene, as absurd as it sounds. We never planned to cover Baldur’s Gate 3 extensively on MeinMMO. But when I saw that scene and its aftermath, I immediately wrote to the editorial team that we needed to spontaneously change our content strategy for Baldur’s Gate 3 and use all available resources for it.
This studio understood the internet, understood its target audience, the players, and understood memes.
However, I wouldn’t have expected that a year later, it would still be part of our content plan to publish at least one article on Baldur’s Gate 3 every day. By all standards, that should have ended about three months after release.
But here we are. Still more than 100,000 players daily on Steam. Not even counting the consoles.
And I am one of them.
