Man, I finally beat Baldur’s Gate 3. Took me forever. When the credits rolled, I didn’t feel relief; I just felt tired. Like, I’d played through a lifetime. That’s when the question hit me, square in the face: how long did it take them to make this monster? It’s too big, too polished, too damn ambitious to be a regular three-year dev cycle. I needed to know the real timeline.

My first move wasn’t a simple web search. Anyone can type “BG3 dev time” and get the standard answer—the time between the big announcement and launch. But that’s the public timeline, the marketing timeline. That ain’t the real timeline.

I decided I was going to chase the license. That’s the real ground zero for any Dungeons & Dragons game. You don’t just start coding. You spend months, maybe years, negotiating the rights. So, I started digging through old press releases and financial reports—the boring stuff. I had to sift through tons of nonsense about Divinity: Original Sin 2 just to find whispers about their next project.

The Hunt for Ground Zero

I kept running into dead ends, articles referencing future plans but never naming the beast. It was like I was walking through a dusty, archived building. Then I hit something concrete. I pinpointed the time Larian Studios, the devs, secured the D&D license from Wizards of the Coast. It wasn’t advertised with fanfare; it was quietly mentioned in an interview, tucked away in the back of some gaming site’s archive, late in 2016. That’s where the true clock started ticking. Not the announcement, but the moment they had the legal authority to start thinking about it.

I figured that 2017 was the year they actually put pen to paper—or finger to keyboard—starting the pre-production phase. That’s where they figure out the engine, the story beats, and what they’re actually going to build. This period is brutal because it’s where they throw away 80% of their ideas. That’s when the engine rework for their custom tech (Divinity Engine 4.0) really kicked off. That was a big chunk of time gone right there.

My next big milestone in the search was the official public announcement. The internet makes this easy; big announcements leave massive footprints. I tracked that down to June 6, 2019. This is the date everyone remembers. This is when the marketing machine switches on. But look at the gap: 2017 to mid-2019. Two years, mostly hidden, just grinding out the fundamentals and getting the engine ready. That time is often forgotten by players, but that’s the foundation.

The Early Access Years: The Public Grind

Then came the real test, the Early Access (EA) phase. I remember this well because I played a bit of it. I needed to lock down the exact start date to measure the public development time. I found it was October 6, 2020. This is significant because this is when the game stops being a secret project and starts being a living, breathing thing that players can break. And boy, did we break it.

I pulled the key dates and categorized them—a messy timeline of practice notes:

• The Genesis: 2016-2017 (Acquisition of the license and starting pre-production). This was the ‘secret’ time, the foundation being poured.
• The Announcement Window: Mid-2019 (Official reveal). This is when they said, “We’re doing it!”
• The Early Access Launch: October 2020. The beta test, but on a massive scale. Three years of player feedback, bug reports, and totally breaking the game.
• The Final Polish/Launch: August 2023. The finish line.

I added it all up, tracing the timeline from the quiet beginning in 2017 to the final launch in 2023. You can subtract the two years where they were just playing with the license if you want to be generous, but the truth is, the whole thing took around six years. Six years, start to finish, from the first concept meeting to the final release patch. That’s excluding the quiet negotiations that came before. Six years of absolute grind, engine rebuilds, pandemic delays, and processing millions of player reports during the EA phase.

The Reflection and The Lesson

Six years is a long time for a video game. Most big studio games try to hit four years max. The fact that BG3 was allowed to cook for a full six years, plus the early research before that, tells you everything you need to know about its quality and scope. They weren’t rushed. They weren’t forced to release a broken mess. They took the time they needed, and the results speak for themselves.

My little research project, just ticking off the dates, really hammered home one point: the development process isn’t just about coding; it’s about persistence. It’s about sticking with a complex, messy thing for half a decade when it would have been easier to quit. I just wanted to find a number, a simple “How long?” Instead, I found a story about stubborn dedication, which is way better. Now I know exactly why my fingers hurt after playing it—they put six years of blood, sweat, and tears into that thing. You can feel it when you play it.