Now that we’ve reached the end of the 2024 primary award season, we have a clear winner in the game industry. Baldur’s Gate 3 swept every “Game of the Year” title in every major juried game awards show: The Game Awards, DICE, Game Developers Choice, and now, as of this week, the BAFTAs.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is the first to achieve this feat since these awards have co-existed together, with the most recently-established being Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards in 2014.
Each of these awards is considered a serious industry accolade, as each involves a wide but particular jury in its nomination and awards process. The Game Awards primarily draws from games media outlets across the globe, while DICE, Game Developers Choice Awards, and the BAFTAs specifically take votes from industry workers, with jury members’ roles and size at various scales.
Baldur’s Gate 3 was considered the most likely forerunner by much of the industry throughout the season in no small part due to its scale of flexibility in gameplay, allowing players to adapt abilities, spells, decision-making, and checks from the classic Dungeons & Dragons system to just about anything throughout the game. It also became an industry and player favorite for its narrative, official acknowledgement of modding, and its studio’s outspokenness about ongoing industry conditions.
Its closest contenders, meanwhile, were horror RPG Alan Wake 2, Sony’s action-adventure Spider-Man 2, and open-world sequel The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the hotly-anticipated sequel to Breath of the WIld. Notably, while all are technically “sequels,” Baldur’s Gate 3 is entirely a follow-up and updates, with zero necessary knowledge of prior games (though knowledge of Dungeons & Dragons helps).
