Baldur's Gate 3 continues its unbreakable winning streak to become the first-ever game to grab gold at all five major Game of the Year awards.
Developer Larian Studios walked away from last night's BAFTA Games Awards with another 'Best Game' trophy for its smash hit RPG, alongside wins for best music, narrative, supporting performance, and player's choice. That's an admirable bundle of trophies in isolation, but they also mark a new record.
Baldur's Gate 3 has now won the Game of the Year trophy - or equivalent - at the Golden Joysticks, BAFTAs, Game Developers Choice, DICE, and The Game Awards - the first game to sweep the biggest award at all five shows since the TGA's inception a decade ago.
Other heavy hitters have gotten close to a spotless streak in previous years. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild would have held that record in 2017 if the BAFTAs hadn't gone with the excellent family tragedy What Remains of Edith Finch. God of War similarly won four major GOTYs before the Golden Joysticks chose to honor (the admittedly more impactful) Fortnite in 2018. And Elden Ring almost claimed the record in 2022, but the BAFTAs instead gave the award to deserving indie roguelike Vampire Survivors.
For some extra fun trivia, the most divided years where GOTY awards were spread between different winners were 2014 (Dragon Age: Inquisition, Destiny, Dark Souls 2, Shadow of Mordor), 2019 (Untitled Goose Game, Sekiro, Outer Wilds, Resident Evil 2 Remake), and 2021 (It Takes Two, Returnal, Inscryption, Resident Evil 8).
It's worth noting that all five ceremonies use different voting processes - some are decided by a jury of developers, others by media - but Baldur's Gate 3 was popular enough to court every single voting body.
Baldur's Gate 3 has enjoyed endless gushing praise since its full launch last year, but its commercial success also means Larian Studios can be stable for "quite a number of years," while the studio works on its next game.
The Witcher 3 lead says "not many games" were trying to match the RPG back in 2015, and that meant "there was a risk" to making it in the first place
The Witcher 3 dev says his new vampire RPG Blood of Dawnwalker wants to challenge genre conventions, but only if "we're changing them to actually achieve some goal"
