15. Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2

The most immediately stunning aspect of Space Marine 2 is the gobsmackingly large swarms of enemies. Tyranid swarms are brilliantly realized here, with dynamic animations and a good amount of rendering detail even from far distances. This is all thanks to the proprietary graphics engine that Saber Interactive uses, aptly named the Swarm Engine. Seeing a giant swarm of enemies coming at you from miles away has never felt more amazing; more broadly, the Warhammer 40K universe has never been so beautifully realized than with Space Marine 2.

According to Douse, the only way for the studio to ship the Baldur’s Gate 3 physical release on Xbox Series X/S would have been to cut some content out and force players to download the extra files over the Internet. The studio, however, has previously revealed that it wants owners of the physical edition to be able to play without having to download anything.

Curiously, Larian’s official website where the physical release of Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox Series X/S can be pre-ordered still features product photos showing only 3 discs. This will likely be changed as we get closer to the physical release, which might end up getting pushed back from March 25 to the first week of April.

For players that might be happy with a digital version of Baldur’s Gate 3, the RPG has been available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S for some months. For more details, check out our review.

The Xbox retail version of Baldur’s Gate 3 will indeed have 4 discs, since we’re 500mb over the limit for 3. Only option would have been to cut some content out but that didn’t make sense, so confirming 4. Updating here: https://t.co/xUoKLALyqr https://t.co/A2QQ3lI7y9

— Very AFK (@Cromwelp) March 4, 2024

It’s probable the wave 1 March 25 date will slip to first week of April because of this, but we’ll start shipping each SKU in order of readiness. PC first. No discs makes life easy. 4 discs, hard!

— Very AFK (@Cromwelp) March 4, 2024

Of course, that level of freedom means there will be plenty of players who’ll want to be able to do the most bizarre and ridiculous things possible- and there’s plenty of that going on in Larian Studios’ newest RPG as well. Here, we’re going to talk about a few such things that you can do in Baldur’s Gate 3.

TALK TO ANIMALS

Speak with Animals does exactly what its name suggests and lets you converse with any and all manner of animals you might come across on your adventures. The results are surprisingly hilarious, with different sorts of animals exhibiting unique and endearing personalities, leading to some of the most memorable conversations in the game. Being able to speak with animals can also open up new choices and branches, making it even more worthwhile.

TALK TO THE DEAD

Another spell that lets you converse with those you shouldn’t ordinarily be able to talk to is Speak with the Dead. It has some stipulations, of course – the corpse you cast it on must still have a mouth so it can speak, which means it won’t work on beheaded corpses, while the spell also doesn’t work on undead creatures – but like Speak with Animals, it, too, can lead to some very intriguing (and often quite creepy) conversations. Speak with the Dead can also open up new branches and options both in and out of quests, further letting you flex your creativity.

MANIPULATE THE PRESS

Baldur’s Gate 3’s staggeringly massive world is constantly shifting and changing, and a lot of that happens on the back of the choices you make. People will react to you different, your standing with certain groups or areas might fall or rise, quests might get locked or unlocked. Hell, in the city of Baldur’s Gate, you’ll even find headlines and articles in the newspaper called Baldur’s Mouth talking about your exploits. If, however, you don’t like what they write about you, you always have the option to take control of the newspaper – through legal or illegal means – and manipulate the press (and, in turn, how people perceive you) by printing the headlines you want.

RAISE FUNGUS ZOMBIES

If you want a little bit of The Last of Us in your Baldur’s Gate 3, surprisingly enough, that’s something the game allows you to turn into reality- to some extent, at least. If you’re playing as a Circle of the Spores Druid, you eventually get the ability to use the fungal spores that constantly surround you to raise mushroom zombies that can aid you in combat. Purely from a mechanics perspective, the Spores subclass might not be among the most powerful ones in the game, but if you’re looking to lend an entirely unique aesthetic to your Baldur’s Gate 3 playthrough, it’s worth looking into.

GET YOUR ENTIRE PARTY KILLED

Choice and consequence mechanics are an incredibly hard thing to pull off, but Baldur’s Gate 3 is a rare (and often confounding) example of an experience that is somehow able to take nearly everything that happens into account and just keep rolling with the punches. The story will change and react to the consequences of your actions even if the most crucial characters end up dying premature deaths- and that includes all of your party members as well. Yes, you can devise ways to get them all killed, if, for some sadistic reason, that’s what you want to do. A fully solo playthrough with no companions is possible, Larian has reassured, whether that happens by not recruiting party members at all, or by sending them to their deaths after joining forces with them.

BITE A POTENTIAL COMPANION’S HAND OFF

If the sadist in you wants to see your companions suffer rather than just letting them have quick deaths- well, there’s some pretty grisly ways to do that as well. Infected with a Mind Flayer parasite, whoever you play as will be battling with voices in their head compelling them to do some pretty nasty things at every turn, which will take different forms depending on the background of your character. If you’re playing as the Dark Urge, in fact, when first meeting a new recruitable companion through a portal, rather than taking his hand through the portal and pulling them through, you’ll have the option to simply chew his hand and end his involvement in the story right there and then.

SHOVE PEOPLE OFF CLIFFS AND LEDGES

Baldur’s Gate 3 lets you shove people in combat as a bonus action, and though it may seem like a simple enough thing to do, it can actually be used in surprisingly handy and entertaining ways. For instance, if you find yourself on higher ground – a cliff or a high ledge – and are faced with an enemy, it can be a ton of fun to simply push them off and watch them plummet to their death without ever having to even use your main action.

INFECT YOURSELF WITH MORE MIND FLAYER PARASITES

Getting the Mind Flayer parasite inside your head is the main driving force of Baldur’s Gate 3, at least in the earlier stages, but this isn’t a game that says no to you all too often, even if the thing you’re asking to do is the exact opposite of what the central story premise wants you to. So if instead of curing yourself you want to infect yourself with even more Mind Flayer parasites and completely give in to their eldritch magic, you can go right ahead and do just that. It comes with plenty of risks, of course, since the more you give in, the more susceptible you become to completely losing your mind, but if that’s the arc you’ve decided you want for your character, the game’s not going to stop you.

PUT ON MUSICAL PERFORMANCES

Every class and subclass in Baldur’s Gate 3 comes with unique abilities that let you interact with the game in ways that others don’t. As a Bard, you are, of course, going to be very musically inclined- which means you can whip out your instrument and put on musical performances at any given time. You might find yourself on a particularly crowded street on the city of Baldur’s Gate and decide to put on an impromptu performance, drawing a crowd and possibly even getting a little bit of gold out of it. Of course, if you want to use that as a trap and send that entire crowd to their explosive and unexpected deaths while they’re enjoying your music, you can do that as well.

THROW PEOPLE AT PEOPLE

There’s an endless ways to go about dealing damage to your foes in Baldur’s Gate 3, including some really creative and goofy ones. You can, for instance, throw people at other people, from corpses to other enemies to even your party members. You will, of course, need to have enough invested in your Strength stat to be able to do that, but there’s something strangely satisfying about flinging someone at someone else and seeing it actually work out (unless the dice aren’t kind to you and it does the exact opposite of working out- which can be fun in its own way as well).

PC Gamer interviewed Larian Studios CEO and game director Swen Vincke about the same. He responded, “Honestly, we haven’t started on an expansion”, and noted that it would be “very hard” to create one that encompasses the level 12 to 20 experience.

“[Level 12-20] adventures require a different way of doing things, in terms of antagonists you’re going to have to deal with, which require a lot of development to do them properly. Which would make this much more than an expansion in terms of development effort. A lot of D&D adventures are sub-level 12 for precisely that reason. So it sounds like neat, easy expansion material until you start thinking about it, and it’s not as easy as one would imagine.”

An expansion would also have to consider all the different decisions made during the base campaign into account as a jumping-off point. Vincke said that developing that means waiting for a “long time,” but while the studio isn’t working on the same, that doesn’t mean it could never happen.

For now, the team is working on updates and patches for Baldur’s Gate 3, with its first hotfix going live last week. It’s also releasing the PS5 version on September 6th. Stay tuned for more details and check out our review here.

The success that the RPG has enjoyed in the wake of its full release has, in fact, taken even developer Larian Studios by surprise. Larian CEO and Baldur’s Gate 3 director Swen Vincke has previously revealed that the studio expected at most 100,000 peak concurrent players upon release, which means it’s outperforming Larian’s expectations by over 800%.

Speaking recently with PC Gamer, Vincke spoke about the game’s success further, saying that for a hardcore DnD-based CRPG, the numbers that the game is seeing are “way, way beyond” what even Larian had expected, while adding that the development team is currently focused on addressing bugs technical issues being reported by players. A hotfix for the game was released a couple of days after launch.

“This was not in the books at all,” he said. “This was way, way beyond what we expected. There’s also no precedent for it, for our type of game to have that many people playing concurrently… Everybody here is very happy. You see a lot of smiling faces. At the same time, a lot of focus. We have reports coming in from people having issues, so we’re focused on fixing those issues, that’s very much on everyone’s minds.”

Vincke also went on to say that his personal fear for launch had been that after having spent a considerable amount of time in early access, Baldur’s Gate 3 would be “saturated” and wouldn’t “sell much” upon its 1.0 release. During its early access period, the game sold over 2.5 million units.

“We’ve seen that in the past, other games were very successful in early access and then on the day of release they didn’t sell much more because they saturated already,” Vincke said. “That was my biggest fear, that that had happened. It was a thing I worried about, because it is Dungeons & Dragons and a more complex ruleset, so getting people on-boarded is not the easiest thing in the universe. That was one thing where I said if there’s a risk, that’s it, people saying ‘I’m not doing this Dungeons & Dragons stuff.”

In our review of Baldur’s Gate 3, we awarded it a score of 10/10, saying, “Like Divinity: Original Sin 2, Baldur’s Gate 3 redefines what a role-playing game can offer in character-building, combat, story-telling and choice. It’s a compelling experience that simply shouldn’t be missed.” Read the full review through here.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is currently available only on PC, but will also be launching for PS5 on September 6. Xbox Series X/S audiences will likely have to end up waiting until next year.

As reported by @BenjiSales on Twitter, Baldur’s Gate 3 is currently sitting on top of the charts for pre-orders on the US PlayStation Store, above the likes of upcoming heavyhitters like Madden NFL 24, EA Sports FC 24, NBA 2K24, Mortal Kombat 1, and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.

In our review of Baldur’s Gate 3, we awarded it a score of 10/10, saying, “Like Divinity: Original Sin 2, Baldur’s Gate 3 redefines what a role-playing game can offer in character-building, combat, story-telling and choice. It’s a compelling experience that simply shouldn’t be missed.” Read the full review through here.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is set to launch for PS5 on September 6. Larian Studios is also working on Xbox Series X/S versions, but with the relatively weaker hardware of Xbox Series S presenting issues with properly optimizing the splitscreen co-op feature, the game is unlikely to launch for Xbox before 2024.

Update: Baldur's Gate III has now moved to the #1 Best Selling Pre-Order on PSN in the US

The stellar launch of the PC version is definitely having a big positive impact on the upcoming PlayStation 5 versions performance https://t.co/KAl4ahnWMK pic.twitter.com/PlljDl6Aq5

— Benji-Sales (@BenjiSales) August 6, 2023

Baldur’s Gate 3 has now hit a concurrent user peak of 712,281 players on Steam (via SteamDB), as it continues to attract an increasing number of players in the wake of its launch. On launch day, the game hit a peak of over 412,000 players, before surpassing the half a million mark the following day.

Interestingly, this also puts the game in the top 10 of all-time concurrent user count highs on Steam. Currently placed at No. 9, it has surpassed Apex Legends, and is sitting behind Hogwarts Legacy in eighth place (which has an all-time peak of over 879,000 players).

Shortly following its release, Baldur’s Gate 3 also became Steam Deck Verified, while Larian Studios also released its first hotfix, fixing a number of known issues.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is available on PC, and launches for PS5 on September 6 (though an Xbox version seems unlikely to release before next year). Stay tuned for our review of the game.

As per SteamDB, Baldur’s Gate 3 hit a peak concurrent user count on Steam of 472,136 players. To put it in context, the all-time peak of Larian’s previous game, Divinity: Original Sin 2, sits at over 93,000 concurrent users.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is currently the second-most played game on Steam, trailing only behind Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and sitting above the likes of Dota 2, Apex Legends, and PUBG: Battlegrounds. Meanwhile, as per Twitch Tracker, the game had a peak of 479,179 on launch day.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is currently available only on PC, but a PS5 version is set to launch on September 6. Larian Studios is also working on Xbox Series X/S versions, but due to technical difficulties with the implementation of splitscreen brought about by the Xbox Series S’ weaker hardware, the game is unlikely to hit Xbox before 2024.

The same was recently suggested by Larian Studios’ head of publishing Michael Douse on Twitter. After reiterating that Baldur’s Gate 3 has no exclusivity agreement with any platform and that the Xbox version has been delayed due to issues with the game’s splitscreen support, Douse said Larian is “obliged to launch with feature parity”, echoing similar previous statements by the studio.

“Far from being exclusive, we have no exclusivity deal that prevents us from launching on Xbox,” he wrote. “he issue is a technical hurdle. We cannot remove the split-screen feature because we are obliged to launch with feature parity, and so continue to try and make it work.”

Douse then went on to add that work on sorting out the issue in question is continuing, and that Larian is hoping to have more news to share on the same “by the end of the year”- seemingly suggesting that Baldur’s Gate 3 might not be ready for release on Xbox Series X/S until 2024.

“We have quite a few engineers working very hard to do what no other RPG of this scale has achieved: seamless drop-in, drop-out co-op on Series S,” he wrote. “We hope to have an update by the end of the year.”

Baldur’s Gate 3 launches for PC on August 3 (though pre-loading isn’t available), and will also be optimized for the Steam Deck at launch, where splitscreen co-op won’t be supported. A PS5 version will launch on September 6.

Far from being exclusive, we have no exclusivity deal that prevents us from launching on Xbox. The issue is a technical hurdle. We cannot remove the split-screen feature because we are obliged to launch with feature parity, and so continue to try and make it work.

— Very AFK (@Cromwelp) July 31, 2023

We have quite a few engineers working very hard to do what no other RPG of this scale has achieved: seamless drop-in, drop-out co-op on Series S. We hope to have an update by the end of the year.

— Very AFK (@Cromwelp) July 31, 2023

Larian Studios has confirmed the pre-loading is not available for Baldur’s Gate 3. That means if you were hoping to get the game installed on your system so you could jump straight into the action the moment it unlocked, that, sadly won’t be possible. And given the fact that Digital Deluxe Edition owners don’t get 72 hours of early access either (the way PS5 owners will), there really is no way to get around the lack of pre-loads.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is due out on August 3 for PC, and on September 6 for PS5.