Larian Studios’ role-playing game, Baldur’s Gate 3, has surpassed Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild by winning all five major GOTY awards.
Baldur’s Gate 3 has now won (via) the GOTY award at the Golden Joysticks, BAFTAs, Game Developers Choice, DICE, and The Game Awards. It is the first game to win the top honor at all five shows since the TGA’s inception more than a decade ago.
Larian Studios latest title has received universal praise from both critics and players alike. It has raised the bar for CRPGs, and is seen as a great accomplishment for the genre. Other games that came close to winning all five of the major GOTY awards, but ended up falling short of just one of five wins include The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, God of War (2018), and Elden Ring.
Larian Studios is undoubtedly pleased with the outcome of the aforementioned awards. Though, one area of gaming that the studio’s founder and CEO, Swen Vincke, is not pleased with is the subscription model, and the possibility of it becoming the dominant method of game distribution. He shared his thoughts in response to a statement from Philippe Tremblay, the director of subscriptions at Ubisoft, who said that gaming audiences need to get “comfortable” with the idea of not owning their games in order for subscriptions to take off.
According to Vincke, whatever the future of games looks like, content will always be king. He said that it’s going to be a lot harder to get good content if subscription becomes the dominant model, and a select group gets to decide what goes to market and what doesn’t. He believes the existing model of content delivery directly from developer to players is the the correct way to go about it. The Larian Studios CEO mentioned that getting a board to green light a project fueled by idealism is almost impossible, and idealism needs room to exist, even if it can lead to disaster.
