Baldur’s Gate 3is going to be huge. I was reminded of my affection for the game when I saw the ridiculous terms it has used to describe its own scale and found them to be charming rather than obnoxious.Baldur’s Gate 3 will have 174 hours of cinematics, which it puts into context by informing us it’s “more than every season of Game of Thrones, twice”. It reminds me of whenDying Lightbraggedit had more words than Anna Karenina, although Baldur’s Gate andGame of Thronesare more thematically related than Tolstoy’s tale of forbidden love and the nighttime zombies who run on walls.
Baldur’s Gate is going to be my big game of the year, the one I most sink my teeth and time into.It just movedto avoidStarfield, another chronological black hole, but I’ll be getting Baldur’s on console so that matters little to me. I’ll dabble with them both but I have few doubts that Baldur’s will ultimately win out. While in general I’ve grown bored of massive games, these bloated vampires of gigabytes and hours that must be satiated in their constant lust for focus-group tested, algorithmically designed objectives that possess their victims into a mindless ‘just one more thing’ stupor, Baldur’s Gate 3’s threat of 174 hours is not as scary as it seems.
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That’s just 174 hours of cinematics too, and that’s before you even get to the gameplay. The first game took around 50 hours, the second 80, and with games getting far larger these days we can probably assume that it will take over 100 hours to beat Baldur’s Gate 3 and explore the world in significant depth. Of course, these numbers are just predictions, but adding 174 into the equation doesn’t throw my maths off.
That’s because Baldur’s Gate 3 is heavily choice based, and so there are a variety of different pathways that each player will only see one version of. Some of these changes will be major, with divergent futures playing out depending on your actions, and others will be as minor as a different line of dialogue or alternate characters present during scenes. Players will get rich cinematics that respond to your choices, but you don’t need to grab the popcorn for a marathon of Game of Thrones, twice.
There’s also probably a thumb on the scale here. 174 is a massive amount, but it very specifically says “cinematics” rather than “cutscenes”, and I suspect animations in battle will factor in too.I compared the game to Zelda in how it rewards creative thinking- if an enemy is on a rooftop you can attack the support beams to bring them crashing down, for example. There will also be scenes that aren’t just alternate choices, but have only minor aesthetic differences that, if I was trying to make the number as big as possible, I would count twice when adding up cinematics.
On a player-facing side, this scope doesn’t scare me as other games bragging about their size like a desperate loser on Tinder do. It means we’ll get a comprehensive reel of cinematics but I don’t think we’ll be presented with a double Game of Thrones buffet. Of course, on the dev side it’s a different story. This is a huge undertaking, especially now the game has been bumped forward. My hope is that the creative mathematics that inflate the hours for players mean there were lots of shortcuts for the devs to work smarter rather than harder.
These days, the runtime of triple-A games feel like ominous warnings rather than invitations to endless playgrounds. Baldur’s Gate 3 is, in a way, no different. But I’m hopeful that this means depth rather than breadth, and everyone will get an immersive, engaging story no matter what they choose, and they won’t need to fill the game with a bloated map or as many words as Anna Karenina to keep us playing.
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