Baldur's Gate 3 devs were worried the game would be so buggy it'd get 6/10 reviews

Baldur's Gate 3 is the definition of a universally acclaimed game. Even if there is the odd outlier, the vast majority of reviews both from critics and players are highly positive. And yet, before the review embargo lifted, Larian Studios worried the game would get middling reviews from critics due to bugs.

In an interview on the Dungeons & Dragons YouTube channel, Larian founder and CEO Swen Vincke said the developers weren't expecting such a stellar reaction to Baldur's Gate 3.

"We were worried it was going to score 6/10, 7/10, there's going to be a bug, something's going to happen, it's going to break down, everyone's going to hate it," he said. "So that was literally our mentality going in, knowing that the content was good."

"But we were afraid of that, that was the thing that frightened us the most. Because it's a very big game, and so we know that stuff can go wrong. Although the game usually has a way of settling back on its feet. So we didn't expect it to go this well, we didn't expect that players were going to react so strongly to it."

It is somewhat staggering to think that the team behind arguably the frontrunner for 2023's game of the year thought it wouldn't be received well, though Vincke does make clear that's only because they worried there was some unknown, monstrous bug they hadn't caught.

It's true that, like most big games, Baldur's Gate 3 launched with its fair share of bugs, with its very first patch packing in more than 1,000 hotfixes and tweaks. Fortunately, very few of them are significant enough to hamper the game experience, and although we have seen issues with crashing, saving, cross-saving, and more, Larian's latest RPG is just so damn good most are more than willing to forgive those instances of silliness.

Baldur's Gate 3 was already a hit when it landed on PC last month, but it's reviewing even better on PS5.