Baldur’s Gate 3 is the highest-rated game of the year, beating out Zelda – WGB, Home of AWESOME Reviews

Baldur’s Gate 3 has absolutely exploded to a degree I did not see coming. While I certainly thought Larian’s latest epic RPG was going to do well, I did not foresee just how many people were going to gravitate toward it, which makes me even sadder that I haven’t been able to play it yet. I tried selling my niece to get the money for it, but nobody wanted her.

One way in which it has been succeeding is on Metacritic where the game has taken top spot as the highest rated game of the year with a score of 97. The previous holder was The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom which is rocking a very respectable score of 96.

However, there are some caveats to Baldur’s Gate 3’s score: just 14 critics have reviews up for it. Of those 14, there aren’t any huge names like IGN, Gamespot or Skillup. Instead, there’s a raft of pending reviews and that’s because review codes went out quite late and the game is absolutely massive. This means as reviews begin to trickle in there’s a good chance the game’s score will go down, although it could be the opposite.

15 hours deep into BG3 and I’ve explored about a third of the starter zone. Please expect my review sometime in Q4 2027.

— Skill Up (Famous Gamer) (@SkillUpYT) August 8, 2023

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Over on what I deem to be a slightly more trustworthy review aggregator, Baldur’s Gate 3 has not managed to topple the might Zelda, but it has slotted into the second spot with a score of 95 from a total of 27 critics.

It certainly looks like the game has sold like cookies outside a weed shop, too. SteamDB lists the game as having hit a peak concurrent player count of 814,666, making it the ninth highest concurrent player count in the history of Steam, just below Hogwarts Legacy. In fact, as I’m writing this, one week from launch, there are 461,776 in-game players, most of which are presumably busy having sex with a bear.

It only gets better for Larian, too, because the PlayStation 5 version is due to launch at the end of the month, and all these reviews and excited people will probably result in a lot more sales. With that said, the Xbox version is still in development hell because Larian can’t get the co-op mode working on the Xbox Series S and Microsoft mandate that any game coming to Xbox has to have feature parity on both Series machines.