Having logged somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 hours (not accounting for my shameless overuse of save scumming), I feel like my playtime pales in comparison to pretty much everyone else playing Baldur's Gate 3. And even so, principal narrative designer Lawrence Schick expects the RPG to continue yielding new discoveries, including by the developers themselves, for literal years to come.
"Every stone will not be turned for years because so much of the game is a concatenation of unlikely variables," Schick told Inverse. "There's stuff that people will be discovering, including us, because of the way it was built, with synergies, and layers, and interacting reactivity. It astounds us, the stuff that comes up."
Larian famously estimated that Baldur's Gate 3 has around 17,000 different endings, which puts into context just how much agency players are afforded as they make dialogue and gameplay choices that split the narrative into one of so many branching paths. In reality, that 17,000 figure has come under some scrutiny, but director Swen Vincke recently defended the claim by saying, in short, that some of the endings are "subtle."
Regardless, it's actually fairly easy to see how we'll still be finding new stuff in Baldur's Gate 3 for years - in fact, it's not even unprecedented in modern games. Take The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, for example, a game of a loosely comparable scale that's been slowly dripping secrets for the nearly seven years since its release. Its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, is likely to be yet another well of fascinating findings for many more years still to come. I can't wait to see what mechanical and narrative rarities Baldur's Gate 3 players turn up.
Larian says it'll "continue to support" Baldur's Gate 3 into 2024 while "working on other things."
