Is Baldur's Gate 3 Still Worth Buying in 2026
Nearly three years on, it's still near full price and still near the top of the charts. Who it's for, and who it genuinely isn't.
Most games that win Game of the Year are 60% off within eighteen months. Baldur’s Gate 3 has stayed close to its launch price since 2023 and is still in the Steam top sellers most weeks. That’s unusual enough to be worth explaining before answering whether you should buy it.
Why it has not depreciated
Larian has treated it as a finished product rather than a platform, which sounds like a small thing and isn’t. There’s no battle pass, no seasonal content, no expansion to wait for. The version you buy today is the complete thing, so there’s no strategic reason to wait for a definitive edition, and the studio has had no reason to discount aggressively to drive engagement metrics.
The post-launch work went into depth instead. Successive patches added an evil-aligned ending path that felt underserved at launch, official mod support with in-game browsing, and a large batch of additional subclasses that meaningfully changed what a second or third playthrough looks like. Cross-play and photo mode arrived in the same stretch. None of that was sold separately.
What it asks of you
This is where the recommendation gets conditional. A first playthrough runs somewhere between 75 and 120 hours depending on how much you talk to people, and the game is at its best when you’re reading rather than fighting. Combat is turn-based and slow by design. A single encounter in the later acts can take twenty minutes.
If that reads as a feature, you’ll probably find it one of the best games you’ve played. If it reads as a chore, no amount of critical consensus is going to change your experience of it, and there’s no shame in that. The most common negative review isn’t about quality. It’s people discovering that a 100 hour turn-based RPG isn’t what they wanted from their evenings.
The parts that have aged
Act three is still the weakest stretch. It’s denser and buggier than the two before it, and while patches have cleaned up a great deal, you’ll still hit the occasional companion whose dialogue doesn’t acknowledge something that clearly happened. The game is ambitious enough that its reactivity system occasionally loses track of itself.
Performance in the city sections also remains heavier than the rest of the game. On modest hardware, act three is where you’ll notice it.
Multiplayer is the underrated half
Four player co-op with everyone free to wander off and pursue their own conversations is genuinely unlike anything else at this scale. It also roughly doubles the length of a playthrough and requires a group willing to commit to months of scheduling. Worth knowing before you buy three copies.
The verdict
If you have any appetite for CRPGs, dialogue-heavy games, or tabletop D&D, it remains an easy recommendation at close to full price, which is a sentence that applies to almost nothing else from 2023. If you mostly play action games and were hoping the acclaim meant it transcends its genre, it doesn’t. It’s an exceptional example of a specific format, not an exception to it.