The Long and Surprising Journey of Baldur's Gate 3: Act 1

The Content-Packed Nature of Baldur's Gate 3

A surprising number of Baldur's Gate 3 players have yet to complete the game's opening act more than five months following the RPG's release. Less than half of Baldur's Gate 3 Steam players have gotten past the game's first act. This surprising stat is yet another piece of evidence testifying to the content-packed nature of Baldur's Gate 3 that can overwhelm even the most dedicated RPG fans.

While Larian's latest title is a long game by any metric, its opening act accounts for only a fraction of the overall experience that it has to offer. This state of affairs is also reflected in the very name of the achievement awarded for beating Baldur's Gate 3 Act 1, which is called The Plot Thickens, signifying that the game's story is only now hitting its stride.

Reddit quote is loading

The post on Reddit

Player Engagement and Statistics

50.5% of Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Players Are Yet To Beat Act 1. And while some dedicated players have already spent upward of 400 hours playing Baldur's Gate 3, others are yet to get past its opening act. This was recently noted by Reddit user BoyThasCap, who took to the game's largest subreddit to express their befuddlement with the fact that only 49.3% of Steam users unlocked The Plot Thickens achievement as of mid-January, five and a half months following the game's critically acclaimed PC release. The proportion of the Steam player base who got past Act 1 grew to 49.5% as of this writing.

Meanwhile, TrueAchievements estimates that 39% of the player base unlocked The Plot Thickens on the Xbox Series X/S. However, that figure is based on a non-representative sample of the website's registered users, which hence cannot be used to extrapolate platform-wide trends. For added context, 90.7% of Baldur's Gate 3 Steam players (and 95% of their TrueAchievements colleagues) have gotten off the Nautiloid, the game's tutorial section, thus beginning the RPG's campaign in earnest. Whether the discrepancy between these two figures suggests that many players have dropped the game during its opening chapter or are still busy exploring all of the intricacies of Act 1 is unclear.

Player Experiences and In-Game Exploration

The first chapter of the game is also in the running for the longest act of Baldur's Gate 3; while some players still end up spending more time in Act 3, the sheer volume of content packed into the opening section of Larian's RPG is nothing to scoff at. This was previously illustrated by one inquisitive Baldur's Gate 3 player who ended up exploring Act 1 for 89 hours, which is normally enough to beat the entire game at a fairly leisurely pace.