The Dark Urge to Start All Over Again – Players Explain Why They Replay Baldur's Gate 3 Ten Times

Some games are impossible to "finish" in the traditional sense. You reach the credits, save Baldur's Gate, kill Ketheric Thorm, and a couple of weeks later find yourself creating a new character, swearing this time you'll play completely differently.

Then you pick the exact same lines you picked the last ten times.

The Baldur's Gate 3 phenomenon from Larian is exactly about this. The game is built so every playthrough is theoretically unique, but in practice players latch onto one or two favorite formulas and run them endlessly.

Some only swap classes, keeping Lae'zel, Shadowheart, and Astarion locked into identical builds. Others genuinely plan to roleplay a villain, then fold in act one and save the refugees from the grove all over again.

One commenter admitted every run starts with a sacred vow to be evil and ends with the same noble paladin savior.

A separate group turns repeat playthroughs into a competitive sport. The logic of "I haven't collected all the achievements" or "I still haven't heard one narrated line on a Karlach origin run" is familiar to anyone who's ever sunk real hours into a Larian game.

And somehow hearing that line in a YouTube short just doesn't count.

The psychology here is simple and honestly kind of relatable. Christopher Lee, who played Saruman, reread the Lord of the Rings trilogy every year and claimed he got through it around sixty times, and nobody batted an eye.

A favorite game works like a favorite book or a warm blanket, it gives you something no new game ever will. One player noted they only have two RPG playthroughs living inside them for life, a Karlach romance in Baldur's Gate 3 and a Garrus romance in Mass Effect, and every other variation just never happens.

There's a flip side the community brings up with a bit of gallows humor, too, one day you'll open Steam and feel no urge to play anything at all.

Against that backdrop, the pull to launch the same game yet again looks less like a problem and more like a luxury worth savoring. So the itch to hit "New Game" for the eleventh time isn't a dark urge. It's the lightest one you'll ever have.