Stadia

Baldur’s Gate 3 gets its full release, four years after Stadia first revealed it

Ben Schoon | Aug 3 2023 - 1:17 pm PT

Google Stadia is dead, but there are still things from the platform that we can see down to today. This week marks the full release of Baldur’s Gate 3, a game which was first revealed by Google Stadia.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is an RPG set in the world of Dungeons and Dragons, developed by the team at Larian Studios.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a story-rich, party-based RPG set in the universe of Dungeons & Dragons, where your choices shape a tale of fellowship and betrayal, survival and sacrifice, and the lure of absolute power.

The game first launched into early access in October 2020 but is seeing its formal launch today.

But, what many folks may forget, is that Baldur’s Gate 3 first came to our attention as a part of Google Stadia. The game was first announced during one of the few Stadia Connect streams where Google would reveal platform news and new games. The announcement came during a June 2019 Stadia Connect mixed in with over 30 other titles. The reveal was rumored in the days before, but came as quite as a surprise given the hype behind the title. That stream and the announcement within have since been scrubbed from the web following Google’s closure of Stadia, but the developers touted benefits on Stadia such as the platform’s streaming nature given the size of the game on PC, as well as the ability to play the game with lesser hardware given it requires a more powerful machine to play well.

While it was never quite a Stadia exclusive, Google’s cloud platform was the only place to stream the game, and the only alternate outside of a powerful PC.

With Stadia now just a memory, though, Baldur’s Gate 3 is launching onto PC today and PlayStation 5 in September, with Xbox maybe getting access next year. The game runs $59.99 for those who didn’t purchase during the early access period.