Speaking to the Dungeons & Dragons YouTube channel, Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke admitted that the developers feared some low scores for Baldur’s Gate 3 due to potential bugs encountered by reviewers. This explains why review codes were only sent a handful of days before the PC launch.
We were worried, like, they’re gonna score it six out of ten, seven out of ten. There’s going to be a bug, something’s going to happen, it’s going to break down, everybody’s going to hate it. So that was literally our mentality going in, knowing that the content was good, but we were afraid of that. That was the thing that frightened us the most because it’s a very big game, and so we know that stuff can go wrong, although the game usually finds a way of settling back on its feet.
The bugs, and just generally unpolished experience, especially toward the end, definitely lowered my personal score on the game, so I can see why they were worried about them. Preeeetty shitty move to delay copies because it was so unfinished toward the end of the game.
Well they also launched a full month earlier than they anticipated, because they didn’t want their launch to compete against Starfield. Sounds like they had some tough tradeoffs. The ending definitely does fall apart a little bit, but they are quickly releasing patches. It’ll get there eventually.
I’ll be honest, I think they needed more than just another month to smooth a lot of stuff out. Heck, we can see that just from how long it’s taken to fix the bugs they have fixed and how many more issues there still are.