Game of the Year 2023 – Overall Winner

thesixthaxis.com:

As we get into the final hours of the year, it’s time to reveal our overall Game of the Year 2023 winner!

We’ve run through a dozen categories up to this point, looking at solo and multiplayer, and graphics and audio, breaking down each of the main platforms, and picking out our highlights in each. Naturally a few games have risen to the top, featuring heavily in multiple categories, and they’ve obviously been front runners when considering our overall Game of the Year 2023 award.

We’re highlighting the top three, as usual, but let’s rip the plaster off and reveal our winner…

Baldur’s Gate 3 is the culmination of over a decade of growth by Larian Studios. Starting with Divinity: Original Sin, the studio stepped back to a classic cRPG style of gaming, and established the genre’s appeal thanks to a Kickstarter funding drive. That was immediately the studio’s highest-rated game to date, only to outdo themselves a few years later with Divinity: Original Sin 2. Having proven themselves, Larian secured the license for the Baldur’s Gate name, reviving the classic RPG series and embracing the latest Dungeons & Dragons rules for the game’s core.

But Larian weren’t content to simply switch RPG rulebooks, embarking on one of the most ambitious CRPG projects possible. The game engine was seriously enhanced to allow for a much more flexible camera, delightfully detailed environments and characters, the studio worked for years with a team of actors to have all of the characters not only voiced, but motion captured as well, and the story might always follow the same main path but has so many possibilities within that for yourself and companion characters to always create a personal feeling experience.

Baldur’s Gate 3 also gets about as