“Baldur’s Gate 3”, the unexpected success of the summer

Critical and commercial success, Baldur’s Gate 3 has already sold 5 million copies on PC, even before its console release, scheduled for September. An unexpected feat.

Published on : 26/08/2023 – 21:59

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Baldur’s Gate 3 arrives 25 years after the first opus, 23 years after the last episode to date and that this old-fashioned role-playing game in the universe of Dungeons and Dragons, the ancestor of medieval-fantasy role-playing games, tackles a genre that has fallen into disuse. But the small Belgian studio Larian has managed to give life to an epic fresco with mad ambition, a story with multiple ramifications, colorful characters benefiting from dozens of hours of dialogue and cutscenes.

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A miracle for this completely independent studio, which took huge financial risks: at the end of 6 years of development, there are 450 employees in 6 countries, which allows work to continue 24 hours a day. A titanic job sometimes abruptly interrupted: by the pandemic and above all the Russian invasion of Ukraine which forced the studio to urgently evacuate its Saint-Petersburg studio, as explained In Silence We Playpodcast by ReleaseSwen Vincke, patron of Larian.

« We relocated almost everyone who was in the studio. The Russian teams, but we also had a lot of [personnes] Ukrainians in our team; people who took risks to escape at that time », underlines Swen Vincke. ” They are all young in our team so they all had to join the army. So it was important to leave. »

Baldur’s Gate 3 promises to be one of the major successes of the year. But betting it will be hard to replicate.

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