Takeaway: even executives with a highly technical background will often make lazy incorrect decisions that can potentially sabotage months of effort by the company. Vinke's decision to under-prepare for scaling issues has put the team in the position of needing to possibly do heroic work at the last second to prevent the online part from falling over and creating very bad experiences for users.
‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K
141–150 of 359 posts
Re: ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
There must be at least some partial formula if some companies can consistently make critically acclaimed commercial successes.
Are there any companies continuously making widely different critically acclaimed games? or do they typically have a hit and then make games in the same vein? Bioware had a certain take on RPGs, same with Bethesda's modern Fallout/Elder Scrolls, FromSoft make DS derivatives, etc. If I'm missing some studio which has a diverse catalogue of consistently successful games, then please tell me which. But I feel they usual…
Supergiant is pretty close? Bastion, Transistor, Pyre and Hades have all been pretty big hits in different genres and styles. They're consistently high production value in terms of art/soundtrack/writing, but the gameplay varies a good bit. About the same release cadence as Bethesda in my memory while being a smaller studio.
Re: ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a gate, it's recognition of your lack of knowledge
So in order to have an opinion, you must play every game that ever comes out, regardless of whether you enjoy the genre, the franchise, or even have the console required to play it? And you think that's not gatekeeping?
Why are you building a strawman? No one said anything about "playing every game that ever comes out" in order to have am opinion, just that it's useful to have some knowledge of a topic before forming said opinion lest they be dismissed as yours seem to be currently.
Re: ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K
#144They're at near 800k users now! Here's for a million concurrent players!
Re: ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
This game also has the meta that most recent D&D games missed. If you know the tabletop game, you can build an optimized character in the bg series, because the game system is close wherever it can be. Some spells are just too freeform to work without a human DM, but they seem to have done very well, perhaps a bit too much focus on environmental damage like the divinity series, but they toned that down right? I haven…
Even the ones I would never have expected to work do, I had a couple of potions of speaking to animals, which led to a lovely (fully voice acted) conversation with some oxen.
And I think this is one of the things modern games have missed for a lot of BG-era players -- discovery and delight.
AAA production costs make it difficult: you can't just spread the game's budget equally into niche content most will never see.
But if you do it smartly, it seems like there's still financial and development space for "Wouldn't players find it cool if...?" things.
One of the major turn-offs of post-TES3 Bethesda style games has been just how soul-less the tracks through their content have been. It's obvious anything "weird" had to get approved through a committee and was watered down in the process.
Games were the better when there was a path for a development team member to have 10% time to implement some kooky feature.
And maybe now that needs to flow through approval... but don't soften it into pablum in the process.
Re: ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K
#146The title of this article is essentially meaningless.
BG3 is single player offline game, mainly distributed globally through Steam (and GOG) which runs it's own CDN for games. There is a multiplayer mode but that is co-ordinated via p2p for the most part.
The "IT team" at Larian doesn't get hit with those downloads as they only send a single copy up to Steam's CDN which handles the traffic (perhaps some backend user authentication too?)
so essentially this article is "Baldur's Gate 3, is a very popular download on Steam" just buzz to push more sales presumably.
Re: ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K
#147[deleted]
Re: ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K
#148I have played for over 30 hours since release, and now at Act 2. It's one of the best games I have played. I am not a huge D&D fan, but I like real RPG games where the player choice actually matters such as DOS 2 and Pathfinder WOTR, so this one was instant buy for me and I am very pleasantly surprised. I can already see myself doing another playthrough, there is lots of diverging in the story. Too many so called RPG games nowadays are just pipes that you walk through with some kind of illusion of choice and few lines of different dialogue.
The inventory management is little messy and could be better, but honestly I don't find much else to critique yet.
Re: ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K
#149The title of this article is essentially meaningless. BG3 is single player offline game, mainly distributed globally through Steam (and GOG) which runs it's own CDN for games. There is a multiplayer mode but that is co-ordinated via p2p for the most part. The "IT team" at Larian doesn't get hit with those downloads as they only send a single copy up to Steam's CDN which handles the traffic (perhaps some backend user…
It’s somewhere in the middle, as there is online multiplayer, but not at the scale that it could be compared to a “truly” online game.
Re: ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Prepared for 100k Concurrent Players, They’ve Gotten 700K
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get this take, just in the past 12 months we have seen -God of War Ragnarok -Tears of the Kingdom -Hogwarts Legacy -Star Wars Jedi Survivor -Final Fantasy XVI All entirely or almost entirely singleplayer and all receiving critical acclaim (except for the poor launch of Jedi Survivor's PC port). And the next few months include Starfield and Spider-Man 2, both blockbuster singleplayer games with no microtransac…
That may be so, but for every game like this there are a dozen that aren't. I just happened to not be interested in any of the above mentioned games. Still, I think the trend of releasing completed games is slowly becoming in favor again. I don't think Nintendo really strayed very far from this so props to them.
Also you’re dealing with a lot of pent up rage from a decade of systemic abuse.