When Baldur’s Gate 3 released last year, I already thought it was one of the most complete games ever made. There’s so much to do in the game, and it took me a dozen playthroughs to actually see everything. Sure, the game had problems: Act 3 ran like the launch of Arkham Knight at points, and there was a long list of bugs and problems with the game that needed to be fixed. But content wise? Everything was there, and there was nothing new needed. Yet that hasn’t stopped developer Larian Studios from adding more and more, making it one of my favourite games of 2024, despite the sheer amount of quality titles that have released this year.
The first massive patch for the game came in the form of November 2023’s Patch 5, a patch that added multiple new game modes and entire epilogues to the game. Honor mode was essentially a super-hard mode for the game that added brand new challenges and made it so that every single action taken mattered even more. The epilogues, however, were available to all regardless of difficulty, and they gave closure to romances and friendships made throughout the course of the game. It was a beautiful way to send off these characters that so many people came to love, and if Larian really wanted to, they could have easily stopped there. But they just kept going.
In September of this year, just over a year from the initial release from the game, Patch 7 was released, bringing EVEN MORE new content. For players who really wanted to play up the evil stuff that you can do in the game (and there’s some REALLY cruel stuff you can do here), there’s brand new endings specifically for those players. What this meant was that players who wanted to see all of Baldur’s Gate 3 had to make multiple new characters to see what had been added.
In the last major update for the game, Larian added official mod support to the game. What this means is that rather than using Mod Managers and third-party sites to download extra fan-made content for the game, they can just do it in the game, adding an essentially infinite amount of replayability to a game that is already ridiculously long and in-depth. Do you want to add classes that aren’t in the base game? Sure, you can do that. How about extra customization options? Go ahead! There’s even the ability to remove the in-game party cap of four people, meaning that you can have ridiculously overpowered fights which involve your entire camp at once (it’s heavily unbalanced, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun). We’re now over a year past the initial release of the game, and as of the time of writing this article (a Thursday afternoon in the UK), almost 49,000 people are playing the game. Those are numbers that most games would kill for, and Baldur’s Gate 3 has had them consistently for months now.
The best part is that the game doesn’t really appear to be showing any signs of slowing down. Patch 8, currently scheduled for some time next year, is introducing cross-play, photo mode and a grand total of twelve more subclasses to the game, one for each class in the game. Each of those works in a completely different way and shifts how that class works, which means that it’ll take hours of exploration to discover all possibilities.
All of this extra content, despite the fact that Larian Studios is dedicated to developing their next title, proves that Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t just one of the best games ever made, but is going to continue to be immensely popular in years going forward, and still remains one of the most worthwhile investments of time out there. Jumping into the game now is almost an entirely different experience to jumping into the game at launch, and if there’s any ever downtime from my busy schedule of essentially every game ever releasing every day, I find myself back in Baldur’s Gate 3, spending time with Karlach, brushing off the constant flirting from Gale, listening to Astarion’s constant moaning. It’s brilliant that Larian is so dedicated to this game, and that there’s so much new stuff to do, even now.
