Arkane Co-Founder Raphael Colantonio Names BG3 His Last Perfect Game

A Rare Admission From a Veteran Designer

Raphael Colantonio has spent decades making games that other designers cite as benchmarks. He co-founded Arkane Studios, the team responsible for Dishonored and Prey, two of the most discussed immersive sims in PC gaming history. So when someone like that says a game made him happy from start to finish, it is worth pausing on.

In a feature published by PC Gamer, Colantonio walked through the games currently installed on his PC and reflected on what he has been playing. The quote that landed hardest came unprompted: “The last time I liked everything about a game was probably Baldur’s Gate 3.”

That is a specific kind of praise. Not “it was great” or “I had fun.” He liked everything about it. For anyone who has spent time reading designer postmortems or listening to developers talk about their own critical habits, that framing means something. Most experienced players, and especially experienced creators, carry a running internal audit while they play. Something is always off. A system feels undercooked. A late-game section drags. The ending does not stick the landing. Colantonio is essentially saying Larian’s RPG quieted that part of his brain.

What “Everything” Actually Means

The implicit flip side of his Baldur’s Gate 3 comment is that most games he plays do not clear that bar. That is not a knock on the industry so much as an honest description of how a designer’s eye works. People who build games for a living tend to notice the seams. The fact that Colantonio names BG3 specifically, and frames it as a rarity, puts the game in a pretty short company.

Larian’s title has collected that kind of testimony fairly consistently since its full release in 2023. It won Game of the Year at The Game Awards that year and has continued to draw praise from players and creators alike for the cohesion of its systems, writing, and moment-to-moment feel. Colantonio’s phrasing adds a quieter, more considered note to that chorus.

The PC as a Window Into a Designer’s Tastes

The PC Gamer feature itself is built around a simple premise: what does someone actually have installed, and what does that tell you about how they think about games? It is a format that tends to produce more honest answers than a standard interview, because the hard drive does not lie. You can say you respect a genre without having anything from it queued up. The install list skips that.

For a figure like Colantonio, whose work at Arkane helped define a specific strain of first-person design built around player agency and systemic interaction, the question of what earns his time is genuinely interesting. Arkane games tend to reward lateral thinking and resist the urge to hand-hold. Knowing what that sensibility gravitates toward when it is not the one doing the building offers a different angle on how he sees the medium.

Why This Kind of Candor Matters

Industry veterans doing this kind of feature sometimes hedge. The games they mention are safe picks, beloved classics, nothing that might read as a slight toward a competitor or a peer. Colantonio’s comment about BG3 does not feel like hedging. Saying the last time you fully liked a game was a specific title released a few years ago is a candid thing to put on the record.

It also quietly raises the bar for what we expect from big releases. Not just that a game is good, or that it has impressive parts, but that the whole thing holds together well enough that a seasoned designer stops picking it apart and just plays.