From Diablo 4 to Starfield and even Baldur's Gate 3, 2023 was an amazing year to wait a few months before playing the big games
Dec. 30, 2023Opinion | Patience always pays off when it comes to games
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It was a bittersweet experience slowly finishingBaldur’s Gate 3over the course of several months, regularly watching Larian release game-changing features and quality-of-life tweaks. Imagine eating your way through a three Michelin Star buffet and every now and then a waiter comes out to add another banger dish to the spread. And then the fifth extra dish turns out to be something youreallywanted – let’s call it Inventory Management Soufflé – except now you’re already full and can’t eat much of it. You know, that was really good, but if I’d waited a little bit longer before chowing down, I might’ve enjoyed this a lot more.
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Baldur’s Gate 3 is an interesting example because it launched, post-Early Access, in overall great shape. This wasn’t a ‘wait for them to fix it’ disaster like PayDay 3, far from it. There was noneedto wait on playing it, and that’s mostly true of all the games I’m going to talk about. I had a great time in Baldur’s Gate 3 even without the benefits of its many post-release patches, and it was fun to take part in the RPG’s launch hype. That’s one of the few advantages of playing a game right out of the gate. There’s no replicating that new game environment where everyone’s figuring things out and working through the new content simultaneously, and community chatter is at an all-time high. It’s fun! Launch day can be fun, at least when it goes according to plan.
That said, the Baldur’s Gate 3 of today is head and shoulders above the Baldur’s Gate 3 of August. Part of me really wishes I could play it for the first time – not to enjoy the same thing all over again, but to have a more polished and less fiddly experience. And yes, I could just make a new character for a fresh campaign, but I’ve got a lot of other games calling my name right now. Plus as I said earlier, I’m already pretty full.
I’d give fellow mega RPGStarfielda different, somewhat paradoxical assessment. You could argue that all games can be continually improved with more patches, but if we follow that road too far, we’ll be waiting forever, continually baited by a better imagined version. That said, in terms of untapped potential, it feels like the best time to play Starfield is still yet to come, even if it does run and play much better today than it did in September. And again, it’s not like it is, or ever was, totally unplayable. OurStarfield reviewgives it full stars because, in spite of the entirely warranted criticism of Bethesda’s design principles and Starfield’s execution of them, if you really click with this game’s vision, it can be hard to put it down.
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I’m not saying you should never play games at launch. I took a week off work to play Elden Ring when it came out and I’ll probably do it again for Elden Ring 2: Electric Boogaloo, or possibly just the DLC. I do think you should never pre-order games, but that’s also beside the point. My point is that waiting to play games is always better for your money – unless you’re buying Nintendo games, which will still be 60 brazen dollars long after you and I return to space dust – and often better for your time.
It’s always the nitty-gritty stuff. The XP grind, the drop rates, class balance, the endgame loop, holes in the resource economy. Like freshly cooked meat, these things need time to rest. Diablo 4’s core has been solid from the start, but it lacked some finesse and longevity. Thankfully, Season 2 has been pretty transformative. I can tell just from reading the patch notes how much things have improved, plus the community is visibly happier nowadays and all my Diablo buddies tell me the game is in much better shape. Things have gone roughly as I predicted, which means this month looks like a much better time to get sucked into Diablo 4, especially with the holiday break coming up.
This is all just a personal rule of mine, andlike my rule of skipping to the newest game in a series, it’s a case-by-case thing. When I wrote myArmored Core 6 review, I was already thrilled withFromSoftware’s latest mech smackdown, but there’s no denying that some post-launch weapon balancing has made multiple builds and play styles way more viable and fun. Much the same is true of Remnant 2, which I also thoroughly enjoyed at launch, and Lies of P, which has not only tuned weapons but also fixed most of its artificially extended, dodge-punishing windup boss animations. All of these games were good at launch. Now they’re better! So if you take anything from this article, it’s that you shouldn’t get suckered in by FOMO.Yourexperience isn’t going anywhere. You have nothing to lose and plenty to gain by waiting to play even the biggest games –especiallythe biggest games.
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