Baldur's Gate 3 is receiving exceptional reviews, and at least based on user score, it has now pulled significantly ahead of Zelda: ToTK.
Regardless of how good Zelda: ToTK turned out, anyone even passingly familiar with the gaming industry could have told you back in January that it was going to be this year's favorite to win Game of the Year. Zelda is simply too beloved by too many people to lose.
Now, to be clear, Zelda's fame is well-deserved; this is an incredible franchise, and it's been with us since 1986. For many gamers, Zelda is synonymous with childhood. But at the same time, this "emotional advantage" means that it was never realistically going to be challenged by a CRPG from an independent studio. However, if it were possible to remove sentimentality and bias completely, it looks like Baldur's Gate 3 would win Game of the Year. For users at least, Baldur's Gate 3 is the better game...
- Still deciding which edition of BG3 to buy? We're tempted to say go standard, that way you can spend the money you've saved on the DnD Starter Set!
Baldur's Gate 3 Receives A Much Higher User Score Than Zelda: ToTK
The Metacritic scores from critics are still being collected (at the moment BG3 is tied with Zelda: ToTK at 96/100) but with over 2,000 user reviews, we can now confidently say that BG3 has "beaten" Zelda in this regard, with a user score of 9.3 compared to ToTK's 8.5. We have to reiterate here, the chance of anything winning GOTY ahead of Zelda is near-zero. If BG3 won it would be the equivalent of an independent foreign film beating Oppenheimer at the Oscars. It's not going to happen.
In terms of user score, Baldur's Gate 3 is actually the 15th highest-rated game of all time on Metacritic, across all platforms. And it's the only game released in the last three years in the top 15. With reviews like this we expect BG3 to win a few things at The Game Awards, but as we said, it simply cannot win Game of the Year in 2023, no matter how good it is.
We will continue to monitor the reviews and public response to Baldur's Gate 3, although with the PS5 release just around the corner, we expect it's only up from here.
No wonder it's so highly regarded...
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