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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

#261

It's a really, really good game. I'm glad they decided to make it turn based vs the real time with pause, though I know that's a somewhat controversial decision (what isn't?). The game itself is beautiful, the music is immersive, the writing is (so far) intriguing, and it runs on Linux with only minor tweaks. The game does wonders to capture the feel of playing a well-DMed campaign. It's no surprise to me that it's g…

Absolutely agree. I love the idea behind CRPGs, but have found that I have a difficult time committing to them. I.E. I own Divinity 2, but have struggled to get past the first few hours of the story as the first area makes it so open-ended it's tough to know how to move forward. Additionally, turn-based games often get quickly boring for me as they are often so challenging it doesn't feel worth it (I'm aware I defini…

The difficulty ramps a fair bit at least in my experience I have just started act 3.

There are also zones later in the acts where they disable resting - this really impacts spell casters. You have to really ration your ability usage (rely on consumables for healing etc), somewhat annoyingly you have no real way of knowing how far through the no-rest zones you are (could be 4 or 5 fights in a row you need to get through or only 1 or 2). I'd often end these zones with big spells still in reserve cleric in particular with turn undead would have helped immensely in one area but I thought there would be another fight still to come so I saved it. This is somewhat true to tabletop D&D but left me feeling a little frustrated I think on repeated playthroughs these areas will be much less frustrating.

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

#262
post #202
post #73

I bought BG3 just because it's a AAA-quality game with no microtransactions, no battle passes, no bullshit, no pay-to-win monetization of any kind. What you buy is what you get, just like how video games generally were up until about ~10 years ago.

Eh. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2378500/Digital_Deluxe_Ed...

Nothing essential though. Just some stuff for people who previously played DOS2

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

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given almost every single D&D movie has been horrible it would be surprising if it wasn’t a well known studio like Larian doing it. It’s pretty common for games from existing “high profile” IP to be lazy, lackluster, money grabbing products. The last D&D game I remember, Dark Alliance, is horrible.

The new D&D movie that just came out a few months ago was actually pretty fun, and it has a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

I went in with zero expectations since nothing else was playing in my theater and I chuckled a good bit. Definitely fun and entertaining.

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

#264
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…

There's a lot more to it than just Larian. It's mostly about a niche community developing into a mainstream one, and the public growing tired of the same stuff.

After the golden age of late 90s, CRPGs went into shadows of a very narrow niche until maybe 2012-2013. Larian were unlucky enough to work during that winter, and their games weren't particularly successful, although well known in the niche community. Pure RPGs were always niche, and it was hard for them to survive because the market has been split into AAA and indie, leaving no space for anything in between.

Then the non-mainstream communities like RPG Codex produced several indie RPGs like Age of Decadence which also piqued curiosity of the people outside of the niche who grew tired of the constant stream of shallow same-face sandbox action soups with RPG elements like Skyrim.

Larian in particular decided to have their presence on RPG Codex and 100% cater to their desires. They crowdsourced Divinity Original Sin development and implemented almost every reasonable advice RPG nerds gave them under their own vision. The result was a solid and fun game that was a breath of fresh air in the context of 2014. Since about that time, pure RPGs formed a much larger following that steadily grew over the years.

The current sales are mostly because the genre itself got popular again - without it they couldn't have possibly reached those numbers regardless of the quality of their game, as they never did in the previous 2 decades.

2011-2014 were transformative years after the massive boredom of the "next-gen" treadmill of the mid-late 2000s. CRPG is not the only genre that benefited from that. Military-like sandbox games skyrocketed in popularity, giving birth to various offshoots like Battle Royale; soulslike games multiplied; there was even a short revival of arena shooters, although not really successful.

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

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hogwarts Legacy is recommended

im just not into harry potter

I watched a couple of the movies years ago. the game is enjoyable and very well done, I'd probably have more fun if I was an actual fan.

You can definitely see the amount of effort put into recreating the castle/town.

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

#266
post #146

The 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…

I searched for "multiplayer" here just to see if maybe I was mistaken about this game; number of players is not a super meaningful stressor on a system when you're not providing a whole slew of live services and simulation, so I was wondering what the point of mentioning the 700k user count was. 700k players when you: - Don't run your own game update distribution/patcher - Don't provide real-time chat - Don't run you…

Even if you're just doing NAT holepunching and orchestrating some P2P sessions, if you get 700% of your expected load and still stay online then good for you.

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

#267
post #29

I'm not a gamer but I randomly stumbled across someone playing this on twitch couple days ago, gotta say my mind was pretty blown at how far video game graphics have come (granted the last thing I played was Quake/UT/HL back in the day). Some of the cut scenes are basically just amazing movies, but even the in game graphics are fantastic. Does anyone happen to know what game is considered the gold standard for gfx in…

Take a look at Ghost of Tsushima (PlayStation only sadly) - especially the fields of grass, absolutely breathtaking.

Also Unreal Engine 5 is to me at the leading edge of graphics engines right now: https://youtu.be/-lkEOEEKYD0

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

#268

It's a really, really good game. I'm glad they decided to make it turn based vs the real time with pause, though I know that's a somewhat controversial decision (what isn't?). The game itself is beautiful, the music is immersive, the writing is (so far) intriguing, and it runs on Linux with only minor tweaks. The game does wonders to capture the feel of playing a well-DMed campaign. It's no surprise to me that it's g…

Absolutely agree. I love the idea behind CRPGs, but have found that I have a difficult time committing to them. I.E. I own Divinity 2, but have struggled to get past the first few hours of the story as the first area makes it so open-ended it's tough to know how to move forward. Additionally, turn-based games often get quickly boring for me as they are often so challenging it doesn't feel worth it (I'm aware I defini…

Sometimes you just have to swallow your pride and watch a couple walkthroughs and character build videos to get into a game from someone who has mastered it; just to get over that hump.

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

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you’re right but also making a good or beloved game is not really the same endeavor as making a massively profitable one. Stardew Valley is beloved. If you described the vision to a 10k employee game studio, they could probably make something that is stardew-like, widely played, and absolutely rakes in cash through micro transactions, $49.99 variegated eggplant DLC, etc. and has the charm and soul of a cold b…

This comment undervalues cold baked potatoes. They are a great snack.

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

#270
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm interesting. I guess consider me confused then too. I don’t get how a crpg has this much appeal. I’m not expecting this to be substantially better than divinity 2; which isn’t meant to be an insult any way.

Because it is actually an RPG, there is actually choices there, even in Act 1 there are quite few major choices that have big ramifications in Act 2. Take something like Pillars of Eternity, it mostly had the illusion of choice and not much real reactivity, the npcs might say few different lines but it really did not matter much. I am tired of the games that present you with illusion of choice but it actually doesn't…

I think you've hit the nail on the head here with the illusion of choice in some games it really feels like the story is on rails and your character had very little agency. Mass Effect series in particular I think is to blame for this the series became incredibly popular but the actual role playing elements were not really there - these games had a Hero/Villain slider and every conversation had basically 3 dialogue options, the edgy sarcastic reply, the goody two shoes reply or the neutral reply. You would arrive at same place on dialogue tree. The story proceeded the same way regardless of how you chose to act. Because of how popular Mass Effect was I think it had a warping effect on the genre.

Voice acting as well is another key thing I think easy to overlook but it helps a lot with the immersion and getting invested in the world. Pathfinder Wrath of Righteous was a fun game but lack of voice acting made it a slog to get through there were what felt like paragraphs of text to read through constantly. By mid way through the game I found myself skipping over a lot of it. Imagine if tabletop roleplaying the DM handed you a stack of paper to read every conversation instead of narrating what was happening - that was kind of how I felt.

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