Baldur's Gate 3, or the sequel that earned its twenty-five-year wait
On August 13, 2023, ten days after Baldur’s Gate 3 shipped, a vampire named Astarion was keeping 875,343 people from going to bed simultaneously. That was the peak concurrent player count on Steam — for a turn-based fantasy RPG with no matchmaking, no battle pass, and no loot boxes. The games industry spent the rest of the year trying to understand what had just happened to it.
Larian Studios was founded in 1996 in Ghent, Belgium, by Swen Vincke, a designer who had spent two decades making fantasy RPGs with the tenacity of someone not yet vindicated. By 2014, Larian’s Divinity: Original Sin had found a genuine audience, and Vincke flew to Seattle to pitch Wizards of the Coast — owners of the Dungeons & Dragons license — on a new Baldur’s Gate. They said no. Three years later, after Divinity: Original Sin 2 became a hit, Wizards called back. Vincke had reportedly written the design document for Baldur’s Gate 3 in a hotel room before that sequel even released — the pitch existed before permission did.
The game entered paid early access in October 2020, drawing 2.5 million players to an unfinished first act that Larian used as both a preview and a live testing bed. The full release — August 3, 2023 — ran to 1.3 million lines of recorded dialogue across 248 voice actors, 140 hours of cutscenes, and 170 distinct ending variations. Development ran through a pandemic and, from February 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; Larian closed its Saint Petersburg office and relocated roughly 90 percent of those employees. The studio grew from 140 employees in 2017 to more than 450 by launch.
Neil Newbon, the actor who played the vampire companion Astarion, won Best Performance at both the BAFTA Game Awards and The Game Awards — and accepted his BAFTA in full vampire costume. This matters less as awards gossip than as evidence: game ceremonies had grown precise enough to recognize theatrical craft, because Larian’s writers had given Newbon something worth recognizing. The companion arcs were written with the patience of a novelist rather than the efficiency of a quest log.
Baldur’s Gate 3 became the first title to win Game of the Year at all five major industry ceremonies and sold 20 million copies, generating €249 million in pre-tax profit for a privately-held studio that answered to no publisher. When Vincke was asked at GDC 2024 about downloadable content, he said the team was exhausted and wanted to make something new entirely. No Baldur’s Gate 4 is planned. Two original-IP projects are in development at Larian.
The original Baldur’s Gate came out in 1998. Its sequel arrived twenty-five years later, complete and without asterisks, and the most unusual thing about it turned out to be exactly that.
Sources
- Baldur’s Gate 3 — Wikipedia — Development history: Vincke’s 2014 pitch, 2017 deal, early access, production scale (dialogue lines, voice actors, cutscenes, endings), Ukraine office closure, studio growth, awards sweep, profit figures.
- Peak CCU record — Game World Observer — 875,343 concurrent Steam players on August 13, 2023; post-launch sales and retention data.
- Larian moving on — Game Developer — Vincke’s GDC 2024 statements on no DLC, no sequel, and the studio’s future projects.