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‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K

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Re: ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K

#61

Post by nottorp »

mastax wrote: post #18

I am a bit shocked by how popular this game is. All the signs were there, though. - Their previous game Divinity: Original Sin 2 was critically acclaimed, very popular for a pretty hardcore CRPG, and had long legs. - DnD has a lot of brand power and has been strongly in the zeitgeist for years. - There's a big cohort of millennials who have strong nostalgia for Baldur's Gate and who have plenty of money to buy games…

Two things:

1. As it's been said before, if you go at it MBA style you'll end up with a crap soul less design by commitee game.

2. DnD has a lot of brand power? The only thing related to DnD that I did was play some computer RPGs. The Infinity Engine games could have had any other RPG system in the background and they'd have been as much fun.

3. Getting Early Access wrong too. It got popular in early access because some people considered it good.

4. You may be right about Baldur's Gate nostalgia, that is probably the greatest driver behind this. Personally I will get the game because of said nostalgia, but I'll wait for enough reviews to have something to read between the lines and decide if the game is any good.

Re: ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K

#62

Post by mastax »

handmadeta wrote: post #27
mastax wrote: post #18

I am a bit shocked by how popular this game is. All the signs were there, though. - Their previous game Divinity: Original Sin 2 was critically acclaimed, very popular for a pretty hardcore CRPG, and had long legs. - DnD has a lot of brand power and has been strongly in the zeitgeist for years. - There's a big cohort of millennials who have strong nostalgia for Baldur's Gate and who have plenty of money to buy games…

I don't want to attack you personally but I think your post illustrates an common error in thinking that caused gaming to stagnate for the past decade. I can just hear the army of MBAs making spreadsheets and checklist reflecting exactly this "paint by the numbers" style of thinking. This in turn means that the next ten AAA titles starting production are going to check all these boxes and then ... will still fail. In…

> You need people who care and know what they are doing and let them do what they love.

That includes Pillars of Eternity, and the other games I mentioned. They made great games but they just weren't that popular. I agree in general about checkbox thinking.

Re: ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K

#63

Post by jsnell »

jncfhnb wrote: post #35
mastax wrote: post #18

I am a bit shocked by how popular this game is. All the signs were there, though. - Their previous game Divinity: Original Sin 2 was critically acclaimed, very popular for a pretty hardcore CRPG, and had long legs. - DnD has a lot of brand power and has been strongly in the zeitgeist for years. - There's a big cohort of millennials who have strong nostalgia for Baldur's Gate and who have plenty of money to buy games…

Divinity 2 did about 700k units in the first month. I think this is about on par with expectations with a bigger brand. I think Larian’s approach to multiplayer is the important bit. I would be curious about the stats of how people play it. I feel like once you have done a couple CRPGs you’ve kind of seen it all. I’ve done divinity and kingmaker. I can’t really be motivated to do tyranny or the other pathfinder game…

> I think this is about on par with expectations with a bigger brand.

No, this is wildly beyond expectations. They sold 2.5M copies of BG3 in Early Access (>500k in July alone) which is already amazing, but one might have expected it to eat into their launch day numbers as most of the fans already bought in during EA. Instead it it looks like they probably sold ~10M more copies just in the 3 days after launch.

Re: ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K

#64

Post by bugglebeetle »

remcob wrote: post #48
mastax wrote: post #18

I am a bit shocked by how popular this game is. All the signs were there, though. - Their previous game Divinity: Original Sin 2 was critically acclaimed, very popular for a pretty hardcore CRPG, and had long legs. - DnD has a lot of brand power and has been strongly in the zeitgeist for years. - There's a big cohort of millennials who have strong nostalgia for Baldur's Gate and who have plenty of money to buy games…

It’s also the only high production game with native MacOS & M1 support I could find. I got the early access just to see what M1 GPU can do and was impressed.

Caveat here being that the full game has yet to release on Mac. The release date for the full Mac game is TBD.

Re: ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K

#65

Post by torgian »

pixelpoet wrote: post #42
flohofwoe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> big cohort of millennials... I feel slightly offended being thrown into the same pot as those weird millenials ;) Absolutely everybody who owned a PC for gaming in the late 90's played BG1 and BG2, no matter the age. Video games are not just for teenagers you know.

I'm about 40 and am usually grouped as a millennial (at least for the common purpose of blame, e.g. killing cinemas), though I somehow missed Baldur's Gate; played the hell out of the Ultima series though!

This is something I wish could come back. Ultima was a great series, and I even liked the trash heaps that were Ultima 8 and 9.

Unfortunately, EA still holds the rights. The new mmo-ish game that Garriet made is one I have not really dived into yet

Re: ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K

#66

Post by spacemadness »

lylejantzi3rd wrote: post #52
jncfhnb wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When was the last time a AAA game was truly fun to play? Tears of the Kingdom, Resident evil 4, Street Fighter 6

Interest in Tears of the Kingdom dropped off pretty quickly. Is that all? edit: I didn't play the other two games. One's a remake of a game I never played (I never owned playstations) and I don't really play fighting games. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ edit2: this is getting ridiculous.

If you know nothing of those games, you might want to stop with the gaming critique.

Re: ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K

#67

Post by ramses0 »

mastax wrote: post #9
rcoveson wrote: post #6

It's not obligate-multiplayer, but seeing as it's a Dungeons and Dragons implementation with lots of best-in-class multiplayer features it seems libelous to call it "single player".

I love how the party can split up and go do completely different things. That's often difficult to do even in a traditional tabletop setting.

OG Wasteland had that feature, along with a pretty decent macro system. Worth a look.

Re: ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K

#68

Post by _cenw »

mastax wrote: post #10
leshenka wrote: post #3

Oh it's okay, it's a single-player game, it's not that you need any server capacity for that. Other than download servers but it's Steam's problem, not publisher's. ...right?

They have a cross platform save sync service which has been disabled, but it sounds like that wasn't load related. I'm not sure how big the save games are but 700k people mashing the quick save button every 30 seconds probably adds up.

They are a pain. I'm 9 hours in and at 1/17GB in Steam Cloud. I've been going between my Mac and an ROG Ally and syncing saves takes upward of 3-4 minutes and sometimes just fails silently (loudly if you launch the game, but still fails). Steam is definitely not built for that, considering that piece of the user interface barely gives any feedback.

Re: ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K

#69

Post by jamesgreenleaf »

I don't believe that no one predicted the overwhelming success of a long-anticipated sequel to one of the most legendary and deeply-loved games of all time.

Maybe I've played BG2 too many times, but for me this was a no-brainer. You could read the steam reviews from early access as well, and the prediction should have been pretty easy. People were already impressed with the early campaign.

Personally I'm putting off buying BG3 because I know how addictive it'll be.

Re: ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K

#70

Post by spacemadness »

jakebasile wrote: post #55
spacemadness wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who mostly dislikes real time with pause I am glad they didn’t go that route. I just like the see the full results of my action such as to see a spell go off completely. Real time with pause also often messes up the art that went into the sound design and animation choreography. Relatedly, it’s so satisfying the way the care they took with sound and how impactful your combat actions are as a result. So man…

Agree about sound design, both in this game and its importance in general. That's something I failed to mention. The sound of combat and just environmental sound is great and adds even more to immersion. If you're a fan of sound in games, check out the original Dead Space. Master class in using sound to create atmosphere.

I’ve played Dead Space the original and the remake and agree completely. Most of the time, if the sound design is spot on, the team behind the game knows what they’re doing and has passion for designing games and what makes them great.
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