Baldur's Gate 3, Two Years On: Still the Benchmark
A second pass through Larian's masterwork in 2026 reveals just how much modern AAA design has — and has not — learned from it.
I started a second Baldur’s Gate 3 playthrough last month, mostly out of curiosity. The game is now two and a half years old. It has been patched into oblivion, modded into a different game entirely, and ported to platforms its original creators probably did not anticipate. I wanted to see if it still felt like the seismic event it was in 2023, or whether memory had been generous.
It is, somehow, more impressive now than it was at launch.
The thing I had forgotten
What I had forgotten is the generosity of the writing. Almost every NPC of consequence has a recorded reaction to almost every state you can put them in. You can spend forty hours doing dumb things in a tavern and the game will track it. The improvisational confidence of the systems — the willingness to let players fail interestingly — is a thing modern AAA games have, with rare exceptions, walked back from. Most of the genre is now optimized for the median path. Baldur’s Gate 3 is not. Baldur’s Gate 3 celebrates the median path being broken.
If the dialogue tree branches and 80% of players never see the branch, that is fine, because the 20% who do will tell the other 80% about it forever. That is a marketing budget you cannot buy.
What modern AAA has learned
Some things, to its credit. The companion writing in Avowed and Veilguard clearly internalizes Larian’s lessons about dialogue density and reactivity. The willingness to let player choice matter at the level of who lives has trickled down. Cinematics-during-dialogue is now table stakes; you do not see talking-head trees in 2026 the way you did in 2021.
Combat-wise, the genre is still figuring it out. Turn-based, in 2023, was a niche taste with a large fanbase. In 2026, it is mainstream. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 would not exist in the form it does without BG3 demonstrating that the audience was there.
What modern AAA has not learned
The big one: scope discipline is still broken. Larian shipped a sixty-hour main path with two-hundred-plus hours of optional content, and most of it works. Most modern AAA is shipping forty-hour main paths with hundreds of hours of optional content, and most of it does not. The difference is editorial. Larian cuts content that does not serve the game. Most studios add content because the spreadsheet says they should.
The second: trust in the player. BG3 will, at any moment, hand you a problem with five legitimate solutions, three of which the designers did not anticipate but which the systems happen to support. Modern AAA tends to lock the doors and label the one it wants you to use.
The verdict, two years on
There is a tendency, with games of this stature, to discount them on a re-review. “Of course it’s still good.” But the bar BG3 set is one almost nothing has cleared, and the gap is, on a second pass, more visible, not less. If you have not played it, the second-act expansion that shipped in late 2025 is the natural entry point now. If you have, this is your sign to start that sorcerer run you’ve been thinking about.
I will be in the Underdark if anyone needs me. Probably for a while.