As per tradition, first, the state of Russia's invasion of Ukraine... basically, Ukraine is still working on taking back their territory, while Russia continues to be a bunch of war-crime-committing bastards. No major changes of late, really.
That taken care of... in what may be a first, I'm here to sing the praises of a computer game that I've neither bought nor played yet! What else could it be but Baldur's Gate 3, the darling of the day?
What makes this game so noteworthy, so praiseworthy, that I would post about it before putting down my money and diving into it? Well, apart from it likely being practically custom-made for me and those like me (a computer RPG that hews close to its table-top RPG roots), it's also more than a bit of a corporate anomaly. The developer and publisher of the game, Larian Studios, acquired the rights to make this sequel to a decades-old pair of games, and promptly... made a portion of the game available in Early Access on Steam, so they could gather feedback from the community as they built the game. For something approaching three years, they continued with that, then released the game... for $60, not the $70 that major publishers have been insisting is the necessary new normal, and without a micro-transaction, battle-pass, or day-one DLC in sight. Yes, amazingly enough, they released a complete product, for a reasonable price, without any way to double-dip their customers at launch.
Reaction from the game-buying public has been amazing. Of course, there's the YouTubers gushing over how they can actually just immerse themselves and play the game, without waiting for a second shoe to drop, and the review sites are all abuzz (Metacritic score is showing 97/100 currently), but the biggest indicators come from Steam data. Concurrent players peaked over 800,000 on launch weekend (according to Steam Charts), and peaked a bit shy of 790,000 players last night. Meanwhile, user reviews on Steam are likewise through the roof, where you can take your pick between 94% positive all time (from about 147,000 users) or 96% positive recently (from about 89,000 users). Pretty much everybody is saying yes, this is good, more like this please!
So, if this game is so great, why haven't I jumped in yet? In one word, Starfield. Even if I had jumped in on launch day, my play-through wouldn't be done by the time Starfield launches in September, which would almost certainly leave me abandoning BG3 midway, making it harder to come back to later. This game deserves better than that, so I'll exercise a bit of patience. As a reward, BG3 should be that much better bug-fixed and polished when I come back to it, and all will be good... so long as I can avoid major spoilers in the meantime, of course. Who knows, maybe they'll even have the issue fixed that's preventing launch on the XBox consoles by then.
