Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General How many hours of gameplay will this game provide?

How many hours of gameplay will this game provide?

In the PFH showcase, they said that a quick playthrough (only main story stuff) should take us about 80hrs, but could get up to 200hrs with optional content.

Depends on how you play. One of the devs said it took them 2 weeks to 100% act one.

Your looking at probably over 100 hours for one playthough.

If you are trying to strictly rush the main story with zero side quests, no exploration, etc. it will take ~80 hours per playthrough, completionist single playthrough should be over 150 hours. But the game has a vast amount of choice and consequences and permutations, all kinds of endings, etc. All in all 175 hours worth of cutscenes to account for a huge number of player choices. If you want to see even half of that you'll need dozens of playthroughs. So this game will provide thousands of hours worth of content.

At least 3

Holy smokes that sounds amazing. So the replay value will basically have me playing this game for up to a thousand hours on several playthroughs?

That's amazing.

So do we think it's 50% more content than the entirety of DOS2 or twice the content then? For a single playthrough as a completionist that is.

I'm basing this on the fact that I have 220 hours in DOS2 and have played it twice, completionists both ways.

I think there's probably 50% more content per playthrough but BG3 has a lot more replayability...a lot more choices and consequences. The potential for a lot more playthroughs.

years. (Fixed it for you lol)

Thanks for the laugh.

OP, have a google for the sites that estimate stats. They generally estimate a mean EA play time of ~40 hours, with a median of ~70. That the median is well above the mean is significant. Many, many folks on here are an order of magnitude above that. You can find a number of threads mentioning how if EA were the complete and final game, we'd feel like we'd gotten our money's worth.

When Swen says 80~100 hours for a full playthrough, I reckon over the next couple years I'll put well north of a thousand hours into this, on top of the ~600 I've done in EA.

Worth noting that Early Access is only act one of the the game...and incomplete at that. In the final game there will be more to do there. Estimate of 40 hours on the low end, and 70 median for just act one in early access.

I got 155 hr from just EA with two characters, first abandoned before Underdark.

In character creator ...
I agree.

Ok so judging by responses here I think BG3 will be around 175 hours per single completionist run without lollygagging.

Edit:
But points have been made about the abundance of replay value, so I am saying around 3-4 totally and utterly unique playthroughs may be possible, so let's say the game has
700 hours worth of content?

The question of the number of utterly unique playthroughs (and how long they might take) tickles my math brain; I'd like to see if I can formulate something. How utterly unique do you need them to be, though? Are we talking : unique dialogue all the way through? unique quests from one run to another? unique decisions and outcomes of quests, ie doing the same quest in several runs as long as those quests play out differently?

So I'll give you my logic:
An utterly unique playthrough needs to be unique in its story, dialogue, gameplay, and build variety. As it stands, there are 10 companions, and 2 custom character origins, for a total of 12. These companions and origins tend to evoke different responses from the story based on the situation you are in and who you have. Playing an origin also gives a unique flavor. That means you can have 1 party with Tav and 3 companions completely different from a Dark Urge with another 3, completely different from an Origin-Companion run with another 3. Further, the majority of these characters have different classes. Further, two of the three unrepresented classes of Sorcerer, Monk, and Bard can be filled in by you (or you can do 4 runs with only Tav or Dark Urge PC and fill one last run with a hireling and do all unrepresented classes). Also potential for a Lone Wolf Run (probably best as Dark Urge???)

Next are the moral decisions you make. There is clearly a "good" run and an "evil" run. You can probably also get a different run by doing a mixed neutral run, and perhaps by doing a combat-minimal run with stealth and dialogue.

Order of events seems to affect how things occur.

"Unique". Sometimes slight variation is as (or more) interesting than something completely different. Take the variations on themes in a Beethoven symphony or Charlie Parker solo as examples, or comparing performance of Grateful Dead songs over the years. A little variety in similar things can be delightful.

I fully intend to play every origin character, which means minimum 1000 hours before even considering Tavs. There will be a lot of similarity, sure, but the little beats where Shadowheart's response is different from Asterion's will be extremely interesting.

Sure! That's exactly the kind of variation Larian was showcasing during the spoilersection of the PfH, and it was pretty cool.

I'm interested in the word "unique" as a mathematical concept. It's both well defined and helpful in describing BG3's scope. If you conceptualize the story as a set of state based machines each representing a character, then the number of unique stories is limited by the character with the fewest possible states. But players won't involve every character in every run; figuring out how many ways things can be picked is a combinatorics problem. It doesn't end there, because as Zerubbabel pointed out, order matters.

In the end, to try sussing out the scope of the game in terms of unique playthroughs, I'd map the game as a graph where the nodes are encounters and all nodes within a map are connected. Then I'd try using different colored pens to see how many "unique" ways there are to traverse the graph. Feel free to use any definition of unique you choose, but I'd wager there are more than three or four.

Zerubbabel's point about the party still stands. On top of that, swapping party members in and out might homogenise runs. I hope the fact that some companions are direct antagonists will provide meaningful differences between similar party compositions.

100% this is very much a math problem. First, we need to make a few base assumptions:
-Party composition matters and can change the run in both story and gameplay.
-We will be doing a completionist run every time-- that is-- going to every location and triggering every event that we can find.
-Difference in order of events can create different runs.
-Most events can be approached or resolved through one or more of the following means: Combat, Stealth, Dialogue, or Previous Event (Perhaps a previous event or location allows you to circumvent an event at another point). An event can be considered resolved once you collect its loot, XP, or progress beyond it.

I am not going to go through a map of events and draw out what affects what. But, in theory, a completely unique run involves a party, set of mechanics, and event order which is never repeated. In theory, at minimum:

-Party 1 (Dark Urge plus 3 companions), Event Order 1, Combat-oriented, Evil-aligned.
-Party 2 (Tav plus 3 companions), Event Order 2, Dialogue-oriented, Good-aligned.
-Party 3 (Origin plus 3 companions), Event Order 3, Stealth-oriented, Neutral-aligned.
-Party 4 (Origin Lone Wolf), Event Order 4, Mixed Tactics with Prior Event Exploitation, Various-Aligned.

When you consider that it's incredibly easy to get well over 100 hours on EA alone and it has very different good and evil core paths I would think it's going to be easy for dedicated players to reach well north of a thousand hours or more in this game. The hardest part is just going to be finding the time to do it all.