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

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

#321

Post by raxxorraxor » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 12:06 PM UTC

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…

Success can also be relative. I am not a huge gamer anymore, but from what I noticed, this year wasn't really filled with many large releases yet and some that came out, like Diablo 4, are found out to be the soulless crap many more wise consumers expected it to be. So people might just be hungry for some quality games again.

Also the studio was already known for quality and some of their own brands were already quite successful, making them more or less the top CRPG developer that also brought a lot of innovation to the genre. Although Baldurs Gate certainly is a brand that draws additional people. I could imagine that their other games will also get in the focus again when people are finished with the new title.

That said, all the games you mentioned were a success I believe. Maybe not that large, but I think they all were "surprisingly" successful compared to many AAA titles that wished they were.

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

#322

Post by zyx321 » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 12:08 PM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #167

Novosell wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Nintendo is the publisher in most of those scenarios. The individual studios, including Nintedo, tend to just iterate from what I can see.

I wonder what the "new game onboarding" process at Nintendo looks like. Thinking of something relatively more left-field and recent like the Mario Rabbids tactical thing for Switch. Was that pitched to them? Solicited to studios by them? In the latter case that would be a fascinating process to observe.

Rabbids are a spinoff from Rayman. I would assume Ubisoft was the driving creative force behind it. And it's somewhat damning that the "relatively recent" innovation is currently two expansion packs into its second installment.

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

#323

Post by jncfhnb » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 1:31 PM UTC

flohofwoe wrote: post #319

jncfhnb wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Divinity 2 did about 700k units in the first month. The new is about 700k concurrent players though (the next evening it was already over 800k), not 700k units sold, and that's just a few days into launch. Don't know how concurrent players translates into units sold on Steam after such a short time, but I think you can easily multiply by 5..10. What surprised me the most is that the game's first act has been in ear…

I think your last claim is a bad one. I certainly avoided the early access because I didn’t want to ply an unfinished version of it.

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

#324

Post by wlesieutre » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 1:41 PM UTC

theoriginaldog wrote: post #303

wlesieutre wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Main thing I'm missing so far is you can't ready an action, which makes it nearly impossible to play defensively. If your turn doesn't give you enough movement to run up to the enemies and stab them, you can't say "I run next to the doorway and wait to stab the first person who runs through it." Instead, you have to waste your turn and then stand around getting attacked. So it's often to your advantage to roll worse…

Ready an action could get really complicated from a design perspective, but I really miss the "dodge" action. It would've been easy to integrate and support offensive play. I use it in the tabletop often when I play tank characters to hold chokepoints. Interested in the reason why they don't have it, maybe some EA players involved in the feedback process know why?

Agreed on the dodge action, that's also a great default to have around too when you can't find something useful to do.

As far as readying an action, at minimum it could work like XCOM's "Overwatch" action, targeting the first enemy you see within range.

But it would be nice to give you a choice of targeting options so that you can designate a smaller area, just in case that's useful. But fine leave it as "first enemy in this area" instead of trying to give you full pencil and paper D&D flexibility. There is a UI for picking between options in an action, such as Enhance Ability needing you to pick an ability.

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

#325

Post by wlesieutre » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 1:47 PM UTC

theoriginaldog wrote: post #304

wlesieutre wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works for some characters, not really a strategy for a heavily armored fighter. And either way, if there's a crowd of archers in the next room I wouldn't want to walk in (sneaking or no) where I have no cover, so I'm going to try and hold at the door. Still the better play even if it costs a whole turn of not being able to use my action. The missing Ready action really tilts things toward those "alpha strike" charact…

Ready an action is only usable in combat, so RAW outside of combat readying actions to jump on people you lured with an illusion into a room is not possible. This is an ambush and would be dealt with stealth / surprise rules and THAT is in the game, so it is possible if you play it by the rules. The ready action is designed to get used for delaying actions to bypass initiative order.

Is it considered weird to drop into combat grid and initiative order to handle action strategy like trying to dodge around a guard patrol, even if nobody's been stabbed yet and nobody might get stabbed at all?

Speaking of delay, I know that's not part of 5e (it was in 3.5), but if we can't have ready action could we at least have the delay option? A lot simpler to implement and it'd at least help with the situations where you would have been better off at worse initiative.

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

#326

Post by jncfhnb » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 2:20 PM UTC

bigger_cheese wrote: post #270

suryong wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I’m curious to see if Baldur gate avoids this. It’s basically impossible imo. Act 2 is always Act 2.

But I can’t agree with your second statement. The problem with long boring text is not the lack of voice acting’s it’s the text itself. I’m not going to listen to some guy ramble about lore that seems unlikely to matter.

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

#327

Post by nickthegreek » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 2:44 PM UTC

_cenw wrote: post #68

mastax wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ive stopped playing on my Ally and only play on Geforce Now as I encountered a save issue that woulda lost over 7hours of play.

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

#328

Post by cableshaft » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 3:09 PM UTC

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.

I did start putting time into other games besides Tears of the Kingdom....after I put over 100 hours into the game (still not done with it, just want to be able to return to it later and still have more I can do, savor it a bit). I'll still watch a TOTK video whenever one gets suggested to me on Youtube or Facebook.

Even 100+ hours (without getting sick of it) is insane for a modern game for me. Like I put 35 hours into God of War Ragnarok and did most of the things (left maybe 10-15 hours worth of samey boring or overly difficult side activities) and I felt that overly padded that game out, I would have been happier with that game if it were about 20 hours long, I think. Still a great game though. One of the small handful of games I've completed the story for in the past five years.

Persona is the only other series I can usually get close to that many hours in without getting sick of it (I think I put 80 into Persona 5).

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

#329

Post by philippejara » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 3:09 PM UTC

jncfhnb wrote: post #77

lylejantzi3rd wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don’t know anything about large franchises such as street fighter and resident evil then you’re probably not well positioned to make sweeping comments about the state of AAA games.

Not going to go all doom and gloom but resident evil was a(completely unnecessary, in my opinion) remaster of a game from the ps2 era, and I'd wager the vast majority of people that play AAA games don't really play fighting games.

I do think the AAA market is recovering a little however in the last few years, pretty much exclusively thanks to japan.

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

#330

Post by tstrimple » Mon, Aug 07, 2023, 3:22 PM UTC

theoriginaldog wrote: post #303

wlesieutre wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Main thing I'm missing so far is you can't ready an action, which makes it nearly impossible to play defensively. If your turn doesn't give you enough movement to run up to the enemies and stab them, you can't say "I run next to the doorway and wait to stab the first person who runs through it." Instead, you have to waste your turn and then stand around getting attacked. So it's often to your advantage to roll worse…

Ready an action could get really complicated from a design perspective, but I really miss the "dodge" action. It would've been easy to integrate and support offensive play. I use it in the tabletop often when I play tank characters to hold chokepoints. Interested in the reason why they don't have it, maybe some EA players involved in the feedback process know why?

If it's limited to readying an attack, it would look like pretty much all the tactical games which have an "overwatch" mode. They already have most of the logic they need with attacks of opportunity. Just need a slightly different trigger.