Yeah, yeah, who cares what IGN says. We may be living in the modern “game journalism sucks” era, but that’s usually from the same people who argue about Metacritic scores constantly. And as the biggest English-language video game site by a wide margin, one that has survived the death of many others, I am not going to say it’s not significant when IGN hands out a perfect score to a major game.
IGN’s philosophy is that a 10/10 game doesn’t have to be completely flawless, as that’s literally impossible, but when you look over their past 10/10s over the years, that puts Baldur’s Gate 3 in the same company as Elden Ring, The Last of Us Part 2, Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War, Pokemon Red and Blue and Ocarina of Time. I am less convinced about some of their other 10s like Deathloop and Overwatch (though maybe Overwatch in the context of its launch era) but to each their own. Here’s the full list if you want to see it. PC Gamer also gave it one of its highest scores ever, a 97/100.
Now that a lot more scored reviews are out, we can see that Baldur’s Gate 3 has 27 10/10 reviews out of 55 total. The single lowest score is by Eurogamer with an 8/10. 52 out of 55 scored reviews are 9/10 or above.
That is why it’s overall score is close to an all-time best. A few new sub-10 scores have indeed now dropped its score from an insane 97 to a still-insane 96. That means it’s now tied with Tears of the Kingdom this year, though it still only has less than half the reviews in. It also lost its “highest scoring PC game ever” title to Disco Elysium: The Final Cut. And yet it’s still tied with…Half-Life 2, GTA 5 and Bioshock. Only six PC games in history have a 96, and Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of them.
I’ve said before that I think the game is now frontrunner for Game of the Year, at least for a major show like The Game Awards based on widespread industry voting. I previously said Tears of the Kingdom had a lock, but I now have to take that back. Starfield is the wild card here, but we’ll see how it matches up with other big AAA Bethesda games that have scored high and won GOTY honors before. Any other year it might be a shoe-in, but 2023 is nuts.
So, Baldur’s Gate 3 keeps trucking, and it’s a wild success beyond what anyone could have predicted.
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