I really hate to compare Dragon Age: The Veilguard to Baldur’s Gate 3. BioWare‘s long-awaited return to single-player RPGs is going for something completely different from Larian‘s opus, and that’s okay. As an action game, The Veilguard is a success. The games are aiming for, and hitting, different targets.
Baldur’s Gate 3 Is Still Going Strong
But, when I saw the news that Baldur’s Gate 3 recently hit 120,000 concurrent players on Steam, reentering the platform’s top ten most-played games, I naturally started thinking about the game’s longevity, and The Veilguard’s lack thereof. For context, The Veilguard was hanging out at 245th place at time of writing, with a recent peak player count of 14,277, despite launching a year and change after BG3.
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By all accounts, The Veilguard did well for BioWare. It surpassed 85,000 concurrent players in its opening weekend, the most ever for a BioWare game on Steam. In the long-term, it’s performing like a typical single-player game. It has more concurrent players than Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which also reportedly did well for Xbox. Single-player games don’t tend to hang out in the top ten for long, as players buy them, play them, and return to their multiplayer commitments.
But Baldur’s Gate 3 is showing that single-player games don’t have to perform like single-player games — at least, not if they give players a reason to come back after they roll credits. Most people I know who love Baldur’s Gate 3 haven’t just played it once, they’ve played it multiple times. My wife, who otherwise doesn’t play many games, started two or three BG3 playthroughs after her initial hundred-plus hour run.
It should be noted that the game being extremely long is another reason people are still playing it a year-and-a-half after it hit 1.0. It took me a year to finish a single playthrough.
Choice Gives Games Longevity
From the beginning, Larian makes it clear that you won’t be able to see everything BG3 has to offer in a single run. The character creator boasts a wealth of options, with several races and classes, the option to play as either a custom character or an origin character, and what is essentially an alternate version of the game via the Dark Urge character, who is tempted by more evil, violent urges than any other playable character.
And once you get into the game proper, the choices quickly multiply. Before leaving the game’s tutorial area, the Nautiloid Ship, BG3 presents several consequential choices. Will you destroy the Intellect Devourer, set it free, or something else? Will you rescue Shadowheart or leave her in her pod? And, more importantly, the game is rich with options for how you do these things that tie into your character’s background and your choices for how you want to roleplay them.
This just isn’t something Dragon Age: The Veilguard is interested in offering. The game has a handful of decision points, but is hyperlinear in the stretches between them. Your Rook can express resolve, humor, or heartbreak in dialogue, and may have more options depending on their race and factions, but the lines are rarely all that different or consequential.
Aside from romances, the game has almost no capacity for roleplay beyond the initial choices of your character’s backstory and appearance. That makes it more difficult to see the purpose of a second playthrough. If the important decisions are few and far between, you can just save time by looking up clips on YouTube.
Baldur’s Gate 3 proved, and continues to prove, that players are hungry for a deeper experience. BioWare may have gone in a more streamlined, action-focused direction in hopes of luring casual players, but Baldur’s Gate 3’s sustained success shows that even casual players crave depth.
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