Baldur’s Gate 3 is still a juggernaut more than two years after its August 2023 launch, with global sales topping 15 million as of November 2024 and a consistent presence among Steam’s top sellers. Yet the vast majority of players haven’t reached the end. Steam achievement data shows only 23.4% of PC players have unlocked the game’s final completion trophy, All’s Well That Ends Well—meaning roughly three out of four adventurers never rolled credits.
That low finish rate has less to do with disinterest and more to do with the game’s sheer scale. The Forgotten Realms invite hundreds of hours of exploration, choices, and side quests, and many players stall out in Act 3, where the content density spikes. It’s a familiar trend in massive RPGs: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt sits at around a 27% completion rate, with only about 65% of players making it past the opening region of White Orchard, while The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition is even lower at roughly 11.1%, likely due to its endlessly distracting side content.
Baldur’s Gate 3 does outperform its peers in at least one early metric. Only around 10% of players haven’t earned the Descent from Avernus achievement, which triggers when you escape the Nautiloid in the prologue. In other words, most players successfully make it off the tutorial ship and into the meat of the adventure before getting lost in its many branching paths.
On the technical side, Larian Studios has wrapped major content updates but continues to polish the experience with hotfixes. Hotfix 34 introduced native Steam Deck support and further reduced framerate spikes across all platforms, with improvements aimed particularly at the notoriously demanding Act 3. At launch, the city of Baldur’s Gate pushed even high-end CPUs like the Intel Core i9-12900K with heavy NPC counts and scripting, causing frame-time spikes and FPS drops of around 20%. Those early performance hiccups may have contributed to some players pausing their playthroughs, making recent optimizations especially welcome.
As the game marked its second anniversary, studio head Swen Vincke reflected on how Baldur’s Gate 3’s success has helped fund Larian’s ambitions for the future. The studio is now deep into two new projects. Industry chatter points to one being a brand-new IP and the other a return to a beloved franchise—potentially Divinity: Original Sin 3. Vincke has suggested the next game from Larian is targeting a release window between 2028 and 2029.
Whether you’re grinding through Act 3, rerolling a new Origin character, or savoring every last side quest, Baldur’s Gate 3 remains a benchmark for modern RPGs—immense, reactive, and endlessly replayable. The relatively low completion rate isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s a testament to how vast and engrossing the journey really is.
About the author: I’m a UAE-based tech writer who builds and benchmarks PCs for work and fun. I contribute to multiple tech and gaming publications, focusing on news, buying guides, and hardware coverage. When I’m not testing GPUs, I’m deep into Civilization or Dota with friends—and recommending Apple TV+’s Foundation to anyone who will listen.
