It was a bittersweet experience slowly finishing Baldur's Gate 3 over the course of several months, regularly watching Larian release game-changing features and quality-of-life tweaks. Imagine eating your way through a three Michelin Star buffet and every now and then a waiter comes out to add another banger dish to the spread. And then the fifth extra dish turns out to be something you really wanted – let's call it Inventory Management Soufflé – except now you're already full and can't eat much of it. You know, that was really good, but if I'd waited a little bit longer before chowing down, I might've enjoyed this a lot more.
I've had this thought – or a less metaphorical version of this thought – a lot this year. 2023 was an amazing year for playing games, and maybe an even better year for waiting to play games. The comeback-cementing release of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty and its accompanying 2.0 update is probably the most extreme example of waiting for improvements. But even for games that were initially released this year, waiting even a month or two could lead to a dramatically improved first impression.
Make great RPGs even better
Baldur's Gate 3 is an interesting example because it launched, post-Early Access, in overall great shape. This wasn't a 'wait for them to fix it' disaster like PayDay 3, far from it. There was no need to wait on playing it, and that's mostly true of all the games I'm going to talk about. I had a great time in Baldur's Gate 3 even without the benefits of its many post-release patches, and it was fun to take part in the RPG's launch hype. That's one of the few advantages of playing a game right out of the gate. There's no replicating that new game environment where everyone's figuring things out and working through the new content simultaneously, and community chatter is at an all-time high. It's fun! Launch day can be fun, at least when it goes according to plan.
That said, the Baldur's Gate 3 of today is head and shoulders above the Baldur's Gate 3 of August. Part of me really wishes I could play it for the first time – not to enjoy the same thing all over again, but to have a more polished and less fiddly experience. And yes, I could just make a new character for a fresh campaign, but I've got a lot of other games calling my name right now. Plus as I said earlier, I'm already pretty full.
I envy the people who will start their journey with features like the Magic Mirror available, with the post-game epilogue ready to go, with companion inventory management that doesn't suck colossal ass, with tightened performance for Act 3, and with the all-important penis physics. Baldur's Gate 3 is a game with heaps of friction baked into its design, but these patches have sanded down unintended rough angles for a much smoother experience. Day one was a brilliant time to play Baldur's Gate 3 – it crowns our list of the best games of 2023 for a reason – but as we approach the end of the year, there's never been a better time.
I'd give fellow mega RPG Starfield a different, somewhat paradoxical assessment. You could argue that all games can be continually improved with more patches, but if we follow that road too far, we'll be waiting forever, continually baited by a better imagined version. That said, in terms of untapped potential, it feels like the best time to play Starfield is still yet to come, even if it does run and play much better today than it did in September. And again, it's not like it is, or ever was, totally unplayable. Our Starfield review gives it full stars because, in spite of the entirely warranted criticism of Bethesda's design principles and Starfield's execution of them, if you really click with this game's vision, it can be hard to put it down.
A lot of people already love Starfield, but a lot of people don't, or at least don't love it quite as much as they'd hoped they would. I don't know if any amount of patches can feasibly earn this thing a Skyrim-grade legacy, let alone put it on the level of Baldur's Gate 3 or the Cyberpunk 2077 of today. I would, however, take the bet that Starfield will be a lot more enjoyable in, say, six months. Bethesda's promising innate mod support, city maps, improved travel, and more in the patches to come. Release schedule permitting, mid-2024 is probably when I'll properly tuck into Starfield, I can tell you that.
Let live service games decompress
I'm not saying you should never play games at launch. I took a week off work to play Elden Ring when it came out and I'll probably do it again for Elden Ring 2: Electric Boogaloo, or possibly just the DLC. I do think you should never pre-order games, but that's also beside the point. My point is that waiting to play games is always better for your money – unless you're buying Nintendo games, which will still be 60 brazen dollars long after you and I return to space dust – and often better for your time.
Games in certain genres are more likely to launch with issues, and nothing comes out more reliably undercooked than live service games. Diablo 4 is probably the clearest example from 2023 of how a few months of feedback-informed updates can dramatically improve a game. Having played a lot of Diablo 3, I knew from the start that I would not be playing Diablo 4 on day one. I didn't need a crystal ball to predict that it would be a mess for at least a few weeks. Lo and behold, Diablo 4's launch and opening season were messy, to put it kindly. To put it less kindly, I'm glad I skipped the headache of Season 1.
It's always the nitty-gritty stuff. The XP grind, the drop rates, class balance, the endgame loop, holes in the resource economy. Like freshly cooked meat, these things need time to rest. Diablo 4's core has been solid from the start, but it lacked some finesse and longevity. Thankfully, Season 2 has been pretty transformative. I can tell just from reading the patch notes how much things have improved, plus the community is visibly happier nowadays and all my Diablo buddies tell me the game is in much better shape. Things have gone roughly as I predicted, which means this month looks like a much better time to get sucked into Diablo 4, especially with the holiday break coming up.
This is all just a personal rule of mine, and like my rule of skipping to the newest game in a series, it's a case-by-case thing. When I wrote my Armored Core 6 review, I was already thrilled with FromSoftware's latest mech smackdown, but there's no denying that some post-launch weapon balancing has made multiple builds and play styles way more viable and fun. Much the same is true of Remnant 2, which I also thoroughly enjoyed at launch, and Lies of P, which has not only tuned weapons but also fixed most of its artificially extended, dodge-punishing windup boss animations. All of these games were good at launch. Now they're better! So if you take anything from this article, it's that you shouldn't get suckered in by FOMO. Your experience isn't going anywhere. You have nothing to lose and plenty to gain by waiting to play even the biggest games – especially the biggest games.
