Baldur's Gate 3 has triple the word count of Lord of the Rings and its cutscenes are twice as long as Game of Thrones

The developer of Baldur's Gate 3 promises the game's cinematics feature triple the word count of the Lord of the Rings novels, and are twice the length of every season of Game of Thrones combined - that's a lot of cutscenes to sit through.

In Larian Studios' latest community update, over on Steam, the developer gives a small insight into all things Baldur's Gate 3 ahead of its release later this year. Speaking about just how big the highly anticipated sequel is, the post reads: "Baldur’s Gate 3 has more cinematic dialogue than three times all three Lord of the Rings novels combined." The post continues: "It has 174 hours of cinematics, making it more than twice the length of every season of Game of Thrones combined."

To put that into perspective, J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King) has a word count of a bit over 450,000 words, and the main Game of Thrones TV series has a complete run time of around 70 hours. That's certainly a lot of cutscene content to sit through, but as Larian Studios explains: "All that content serves to give you a tremendous amount of choice and consequence, ensuring everyone's adventure will be unique."

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Although exciting news itself, one of the main takeaways from this community update is that Baldur's Gate 3's release date has been moved to avoid competing with Bethesda's upcoming RPG Starfield. Previously, Baldur's Gate 3 was set to launch on PC and PS5 on August 31 (just a few days before Starfield) but now it'll release on PC on August 3 and on September 6 for PS5 - the very same day as Starfield launches exclusively on Xbox Series X and PC.

Find out what you can play in the meantime with our best RPG games list.

After studying Film Studies and Creative Writing at university, I was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at Player Two PR where I helped to release a number of indie titles. I then got even luckier when I became a Trainee News Writer at GamesRadar+ before being promoted to a fully-fledged News Writer after a year and a half of training. My expertise lies in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, cozy indies, and The Last of Us, but especially in the Kingdom Hearts series. I'm also known to write about the odd Korean drama for the Entertainment team every now and then.