To experience every possible story permutation on a single character in Baldur's Gate 3, it can take up to 18 playthroughs, lead writer Adam Smith recently revealed in an interview with Game ZXC. It's no secret that Baldur's Gate 3 is a huge game, complete with custom and origin characters, diverging storylines, romance, factions, and more, but this statistic really puts it into perspective.
Previously, Larian Studios has said that Baldur's Gate 3 has 174 hours of cutscenes, which it said is twice the combined length of every Game of Thrones season out there. Those cutscenes are the result of various story choices, permutations, and dice rolls made by the player. Furthermore, Larian Studios has stated that a single playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3 will take players between 75 and 100 hours to beat on average. If anything is clear based on this alone, it's that Baldur's Gate 3 is packed with content of all shapes and sizes.
During our conversation with Smith, we talked about the various permutations in the overarching story, in quest design, and in characters. Baldur's Gate 3, overall, is only possible because of how everyone at Larian collaborated together on every single aspect of the game. For example, one writer was responsible for working on and assigning tasks based on all the possible romance permutations in the game, and that's just one facet of consideration for Baldur's Gate 3 characters. There's the perspective of origin characters vs. custom characters, factions, and more that all have to be factored in. When testing these origin characters and their various permutation, Smith realized that...
"...for one of them, just to test every branch of the story, I needed to play the game 18 times."
Now, of course, this includes permutations of all sorts, such as the romances among Baldur's Gate 3's companions, how they took on the major story branches, how they worked with factions found around the game, and more. It's also possible to see some of these permutations by save scumming, while perhaps some could be seen in partial playthroughs, but the whole game cannot be seen in one playthrough simply because of how much the story can diverge. This may seem daunting, but it's highly, highly, highly unlikely that anyone would invest the 1800 or so hours required to complete 18 full playthroughs. This does come with one huge benefit for players, though; all of these permutations contribute to personalizing the game for each player. "By the time you reach the ending, you've told your own story," Smith said.
As a result, the sheer replay value of Baldur's Gate 3 is incredibly high, and a lot of that depends on how players engage with the title as well. With its full release on the horizon, Smith had one major piece of advice for players: "Baldur's Gate 3 is a big world of connections, systems, toys, characters, and more. Experiment with it, play with it, and see what's possible."
Baldur’s Gate 3 releases on August 3 for PC and September 6 for PS5.
