Baldur's Gate 3 is crowned PC Game of the Year at the Golden Joystick Awards 2023

Baldur's Gate 3 winning at the Golden Joystick Awards 2023 — (Image credit: Larian Studios)

Baldur's Gate 3 has been named PC Game of the Year at the Golden Joystick Awards 2023 powered by Intel.

Larian Studios' juggernaut RPG continues its win streak with another coveted accolade, rising to the top of another fiercely contested category.

Beating off some top competition to the tippy-top spot of PC gaming, Baldur's Gate 3 is your most desired desktop delight, wowing with its choice-laden quests, endearing characters, and Dungeons & Dragons DNA.

Here's the Golden Joystick Awards 2023 nominees list in full:

Baldur's Gate 3 (winner)
Diablo 4
Dave the Diver
Tchia
System Shock
Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew

You've perhaps read our five-star Baldur's Gate 3 review before now, but it's worth quoting our writer, Senior News Editor Ali Jones, as he bills the sprawling role-player as "a new gold standard for RPGs".

More than that, Ali says: "Baldur's Gate 3 is the most successful and authentic take on D&D in the tabletop franchise's 50-year history. Its complexity and size might be daunting for novices, but the breadth and depth of Baldur's Gate 3's world make this a once-in-a-generation achievement."

It's hard to argue with any of that, and while Baldur's Gate 3 has its own dedicated PS5 playerbase (and is still expected to land on Xbox Series X and S before the end of the year), part of what makes this PC Game of the Year nod so fitting is the time the game spent growing in Early Access beforehand.

With just shy of three years in the pre-full launch development oven, Baldur's Gate 3 is a shining example of Early Access done right – where Larian's dedicated community itself helped shape the road to release with continuous feedback. The result is the masterpiece that exists today: a multi-award-winning game in fine form, and the Golden Joystick Awards 2023's PC Game of the Year.

Discover the best games of 2023 at the best prices by checking out the Golden Joystick Awards Steam sale page

PRODUCTS

Joe Donnelly is a sports editor from Glasgow and former features editor at GamesRadar+. A mental health advocate, Joe has written about video games and mental health for The Guardian, New Statesman, VICE, PC Gamer and many more, and believes the interactive nature of video games makes them uniquely placed to educate and inform. His book Checkpoint considers the complex intersections of video games and mental health, and was shortlisted for Scotland's National Book of the Year for non-fiction in 2021. As familiar with the streets of Los Santos as he is the west of Scotland, Joe can often be found living his best and worst lives in GTA Online and its PC role-playing scene.