Everyone Wants to Be the Next Baldur's Gate 3 — And Most of Them Are Going to Fail

When Baldur's Gate 3 fully launched in August 2023, nobody in the mainstream gaming press was quite prepared for what happened next. A dense, old-school-inspired CRPG — the kind of game that publishers had spent years quietly declaring a dead genre — became a legitimate cultural phenomenon. It won Game of the Year at The Game Awards. It sold millions of copies. It had players posting unhinged, beautiful, occasionally chaotic stories all over social media for months. Larian Studios, a Belgian developer that most casual gamers had barely heard of, suddenly looked like the smartest studio on the planet.

And just like that, every executive in a glass-walled conference room started asking the same question: how do we get a piece of that?

What BG3 Actually Did Right

Before we talk about the stampede to copy it, it's worth being honest about why Baldur's Gate 3 worked — because the answer is more complicated than most studios want to admit.

It wasn't just the production values, though those were legitimately stunning. It wasn't just the D&D license, though that gave it a built-in audience. What made BG3 resonate so deeply was the feeling that the game genuinely respected the player. Choices had weight. The world reacted to your decisions. You could do unexpected, ridiculous, creative things and the game would roll with it rather than funnel you back onto the rails. The writing was sharp. The companion characters felt like real people. And crucially, it launched in a state that was actually playable — a bar that, depressingly, not every AAA game clears in 2025.

Larian spent years in Early Access refining the thing. They listened to feedback. They shipped updates constantly. The finished product felt like a labor of love from people who actually played RPGs. That's harder to manufacture than a budget or a license.

The Publisher Rush

None of that nuance stopped the industry from treating BG3's success like a formula to be photocopied.

Within months of its launch, reports started surfacing about publishers fast-tracking single-player RPG projects that had previously been deprioritized in favor of live-service titles. A number of studios confirmed internally that their pitches suddenly got a lot more traction when framed around "deep narrative choices" and "player agency." The language of BG3's marketing started showing up in press releases for games that had nothing to do with tabletop RPGs.

Microsoft and Xbox, stinging from a rough stretch of live-service misfires, reportedly doubled down on narrative-driven RPG development across several of their studios. BioWare, a studio that practically invented the modern Western RPG template before stumbling badly with Anthem and the later Mass Effect entries, suddenly found itself positioned as a comeback story in waiting — with Dragon Age: The Veilguard arriving in late 2024 carrying enormous expectations shaped almost entirely by what Larian had proven was possible.

Who's Actually Getting It Right

To be fair, some studios have absorbed BG3's lessons thoughtfully rather than just aesthetically.

Owlcat Games, the team behind the Pathfinder CRPG series, has been quietly building deep, mechanically rich RPGs for years and already had the DNA in place to benefit from the renewed appetite for the genre. Obsidian Entertainment, home to some of the sharpest RPG writers in the business, has looked increasingly well-positioned heading into 2025 with Avowed — a game that understood it didn't need to be BG3, it just needed to be confidently itself.

Smaller studios have also used the moment smartly. Several indie developers pivoted pitches toward narrative-heavy RPGs with branching stories and found funding that might not have existed two years earlier. When the genre tide rises, some boats genuinely do float.

Who's Getting It Wrong — Badly

Then there's the other category. The studios and publishers who looked at Baldur's Gate 3's success and decided the secret ingredient was scope.

BG3 is a big game, sure. But size wasn't the point. Plenty of enormous games feel hollow. What's already becoming visible in some of the announced and released titles chasing BG3's shadow is a fundamental misreading of why players connected with it. Throwing a hundred hours of content at someone isn't the same as making them care about any of it. Slapping "meaningful choices" into a marketing bullet point doesn't mean the game actually delivers them.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is an instructive case. It wasn't a bad game by any objective measure, but many longtime BioWare fans felt it had sanded off exactly the rough, complicated edges that made the old Dragon Age titles memorable. In trying to be more accessible — more like a modern action RPG with RPG elements — it arguably moved away from what BG3 proved audiences were hungry for. The irony was thick.

The Larian Problem

Here's the uncomfortable truth that nobody in a boardroom wants to say out loud: Larian Studios made Baldur's Gate 3 because they are Larian Studios.

They had already made Divinity: Original Sin and its sequel — both critically acclaimed, both commercially successful enough to fund increasingly ambitious projects. They had a company culture built around a specific vision of what RPGs could be. They had creative leadership with genuine conviction. They spent years on BG3 and weren't afraid to delay it until it was ready.

That's not a formula. That's an identity. And identity is the one thing you genuinely cannot copy.

Studios that are pivoting to chase BG3's success without the underlying creative philosophy are essentially building a house by looking at a photograph of someone else's house. It might look similar from a distance. But the foundation isn't there.

What This Moment Actually Means for Players

For all the cynicism about the industry's motivations, the BG3 effect has produced at least one genuinely good outcome: publishers are once again willing to greenlight ambitious single-player experiences. That's real. A few years ago, the conventional wisdom was that live-service was the only viable model at scale. Larian blew that up.

More RPGs are coming. More narrative-driven games are getting funded. Some of them are going to be great. Some are going to be transparent cash-grabs dressed in the aesthetic of depth. Players will sort out which is which, the same way they always do.

The studios that understand what made BG3 special — the respect for player intelligence, the willingness to let stories get messy and weird, the commitment to shipping something finished — those are the ones worth watching. The rest are just hoping the lightning strikes twice in their direction.

It won't. But the attempt should at least keep things interesting.