Who are these people that finish these massive RPGs in a week or so? I'm still working my way through Act 1.
The game has been out just over three weeks, which is a little bit more than "a week or so", I'd say. But generally people who have no kids and a limited social life (or at least all their friends are on holiday elsewhere atm, which has been the case for me).
I haven't actually finished Act 3 myself, but if I hadn't gone on holiday for a week and had some stuff after that I would have.
There are some major, major issues and tons of cut content (mostly in Act 3) that could do with resolving, so whether they do DLC or not (and it seems like they probably will, now), the fact that they're no longer messaging that they're going to just finish the game and move on is very positive.
The way Swen had been talking it was as if they expected to get like 85-90% reviews, sell like, 5m copies and then slowly sell more over the next few years, and that whilst this would make them an a solid AAA company, they'd basically have to make lower-end AAA or even AA-type games going forwards, just multiple at once. But instead they got 96%*, have probably sold close to or even over 10m copies with no sign of stopping, and the game is incredibly highly anticipated on PS5 and Xbox. Obviously MS, Sony and others are sniffing around them too, considering whether they could buy them (which given BG3 may well make well over $1bn in revenue, will not likely be cheap).
The decision to move the release forward a month, even though it seems to the cause of some of the cut content and some ending issues (not ME3 level, thankfully) seems to have been a very, very smart one.
* = Literally the only reason BG3 is no longer the best-reviewed PC game in history is Eurogamer changed their review system to a 1-5 star approach, leading to them giving it a rather clickbait-y 4/5 (treated by Metacritic as 80%). That would be fine if it wasn't for some of the games they've given 5 stars, and the fact they will
undoubtedly give 5 stars to Starfield,
regardless of actual quality - they effectively gave the deeply mediocre Fallout 4 5 Stars - "Recommended" despite mentioning it was buggy as hell and not having good gameplay! (I will become a vegetarian for a week if they don't lol).
