Baldur's Gate 3 was originally revealed with a CGI trailer at a conference for the Google Stadia cloud gaming service in June 2019 as part of an Early Access exclusivity deal that would ultimately be cancelled when Stadia was shut down in 2023. The game's director Swen Vincke touted the service at the time for its purported accessibility, and the potential for in-game community feedback to directly affect the game's development and playthroughs via Stadia's Crowd Choice feature. However, Vincke later expressed regret over having the game be revealed this way, calling it "a really stupid deal" due to the challenges of releasing an Early Access build to a second platform, but that "it allowed me to pay for the CGI."

Upon its initial release, the game attracted widespread attention for the unexpectedly hypersexual characterization of its party members, who were quick to propose sex with the player. At the start of September 2023, director Swen Vincke revealed that this was actually the result of a bug, which was in the process of being gradually tweaked via patches. According to Vincke, the game's relationship mechanic was "supposed to simulate how real relationships are," and that the initial hypersexuality of the cast would be "problematic" in a real-life context.

Baldur's Gate 3 was the first AAA game to win all five of what is referred to as the major Game of the Year awards, those being the BAFTAs, The Game Awards, DICE, Game Developers Choice, and the Golden Joystick awards.

According to Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke, Ultima VII: The Black Gate is his favorite RPG, and it had a life-long influence on the development of the Divinity series and Baldur's Gate 3. Amidst the increasing popularity of the Diablo series, he felt that he needed to carry the baton for the environmental interactivity, non-linear gameplay, and dialogue/party reactions featured in Ultima VII that had otherwise been neglected or abandoned in other RPGs at the time.

In a December 15, 2023 article published in PC Gamer, Swen Vincke, the CEO of Larian Studios, revealed that the Dungeons & Dragons team he initially worked with on the game was now gone due to Hasbro layoffs. The layoffs resulted in a significant reduction in the number of people working on the game, with Vincke stating that "there’s almost nobody left".