Baldur’s Gate 3’s Praised Writing Gets Called Overrated by Polygon Critic
Nearly three years after becoming the industry’s benchmark for choice-driven storytelling, Baldur’s Gate 3 is facing a rare mainstream rebuke of its writing. Polygon published a piece as part of its recurring “Spicy Takes” opinion strand arguing that the RPG’s much-celebrated branching narrative actually undercuts itself, a stance the outlet promoted directly on its own Facebook page under the header “Baldur Gate 3’s writing is overrated.”
The central complaint isn’t that Larian Studios’ 2023 Game of the Year winner is badly written scene-by-scene — it’s that spreading a story across so many possible branches leaves few individual choices carrying real dramatic weight. That argument leans on a statistic Larian itself has long promoted: Baldur’s Gate 3’s oft-cited count of roughly 17,000 possible endings. Independent coverage of the game confirms the figure has circulated widely since launch, with outlets noting “the game was touted as having 17,000 possible endings, and even though most of them were slight permutations of a few main endings, that number speaks to the incredible level of variance.”
Cacciatore’s Case Against the 17,000-Ending Model
The Polygon piece is credited to critic Francesco Cacciatore, who frames the huge branching total as more marketing sleight of hand than storytelling triumph, arguing it counts minor variations rather than meaningfully different conclusions. He reportedly measures Baldur’s Gate 3 against older RPGs where player freedom existed but an authored story still came first, and singles out companion reactions to major turning points — including the option to transform into a Mind Flayer and the game’s darkest self-sacrifice path — as moments that land with less emotional follow-through than their scale would suggest.
Romance, according to the piece, is where the critique sharpens the most, contrasting Baldur’s Gate 3’s approval-gated companion relationships with older Baldur’s Gate lore, including the drow priestess Viconia from Baldur’s Gate 2. The piece is said to describe the newer game’s pairings in blunt terms, with Cacciatore writing that in his own experience they are
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