Baldur’s Gate III Coming To Early Access This September

Having watched their previous tentative August release date all but sail past, Larian Studios have now officially announced when Baldur’s Gate III will be accessible to the players: September 30th, 2020. Not bad, since the announcement for it only dropped during E3 2019. That said, the game is releasing in Early Access rather than a full release, so expect bugs and bumps galore as the developers continue working on the game with input from the community.

The titular Baldur’s Gate is a sprawling harbor city set within Dungeons and Dragons’ Forgotten Realms campaign setting and as such, Baldur’s Gate as a game series has always based its gameplay off the Dungeons And Dragons rulesets. Unlike previous installments in the series which were based around older iterations, Baldur’s Gate III is using the up-to-date 5th edition ruleset for Dungeons and Dragons.

It’s not clear what the entry price for Baldur’s Gate III will be and there’s no timeline as yet for when the game will make its full release. Our best guess is it’s at least a year away, based on the time it took Larian Studios’ previous title Divinity: Original Sin II to go from Early Access to full release. With the state of the world leaving much of Larian Studios working from home and progress being slower than usual though, it’s probably unwise to speculate too much.

In terms of what we can expect, we know the classes and races that Baldur’s Gate III is due to include. There are twelve classes, which immediately opens up an enormous variety in gameplay. They cover the twelve standard Dungeons And Dragons classes, including the warlock, barbarian, druid, rogue, and the bard. So far there are ten races including Tieflings, Githyanki, and Drow, alongside more standard fare like humans and elves.

As for content, players can expect to sink at least a few hours into the initial early access release, especially if one were to replay it with multiple class-race combinations, with about 80 potential combat encounters and thousands of lines of dialogue. With the hope for Baldur’s Gate III to be a sprawling RPG too, your character choices will have the potential to send the story in different directions.

Hopefully, the character creator is going to be sufficiently in-depth, at least at full release if not in Early Access. If you aren’t losing hours of your life to an RPG’s character creator, is it even really an RPG? Well, we’ll see if the whole thing shapes up any good. Personally, I’m incredibly hopeful. If nothing else, I think it’s about time for an expansive fantasy RPG to step up. Something needs to fill the Dragon Age shaped hole in my heart.