Baldur’s Gate 3 Moves Up PC Release Date, Pushes Back PS5 Release

In a community post on Steam, the developers of Baldur’s Gate 3 made a surprising announcement about the release date for the full version of the game, which has been in Early Access since 2020. We won’t make you hold your breath: Baldur’s Gate 3’s release date on PC has been moved up to August 3rd, 2023, while its PlayStation 5 release date has been pushed back to September 6th. This is good news for PC players, who will get access to the game nearly a month earlier than the previously-planned August 31st release date, but might be frustrating to PS5 players who will have to wait an extra week before getting the full release.

Larian Studios, the developers of Baldur’s Gate 3, also mentioned in the community post their reasoning for this: while the PC version of the game will be ready for launch earlier than expected, having hit all the benchmark targets and being feature complete, the developers needed a bit of extra time on the PS5 version in order to ensure 60-FPS on launch. In the wake of so many games with performance issues (including sub-60-FPS gameplay), it is good to hear Larian Studios is taking optimization seriously on all platforms. This is also the same reason Larian Studios has cited for waiting to release on Xbox and Mac systems, though they are trying to ensure the former will run optimally, and are working hard on ensuring the latter will.

Some speculation also suggests that Larian Studios made this choice in order to avoid releasing the PC version of Baldur’s Gate 3 too close to the release of Bethesda’s hotly-anticipated Starfield, which is releasing on September 6th. This would make sense, as Starfield is looking to be one of the biggest RPG releases of the year, though this only makes sense for the PC version of the game — the delay on the PS5 version actually puts it to be released on the same exact day as Starfield.

The community post in which this was announced also made waves for a huge number of other announcements for Baldur’s Gate 3, more races, classes, feats, subclasses, and more, as well as a higher level cap. You can expect more coverage on that soon. For now, the big takeaway from the announcement is that the PC version of Baldur’s Gate 3 will now be released on August 3rd, while the PS5 version will not be released on September 6th.