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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

#161

Post by LegitShady »

password54321 wrote: post #154
LegitShady wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>-God of War Ragnarok playstation exclusive >-Tears of the Kingdom nintendo exclusive >-Hogwarts Legacy I don't know anyone who has played it - maybe we're just not that interested in harry potter >-Star Wars Jedi Survivor launched with multiple huge bugs including progression stopping bugs. I'll get it when its cheap and theyve fixed everything, or they haven't and I won't. If your game is bugged from day one don't…

*timed exclusive, plus Switch emulator.

an exclusive is an exclusive. "timed exclusive" is an exclusive. Also not interested in dealing with piracy and other things for switch emulator - there's no way for a normal person to buy the game and play it on a switch emulator - you need an old version of the switch to dump it even if you wanted to, so you have to have the platform to emulate it without piracy anyways.

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

#162

Post by bugglebeetle »

mastax wrote: post #85
lylejantzi3rd wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I definitely underestimated the brand power of DnD and Baldur's Gate I think you're trying to put too much of its success on "brand power". Social proof is a thing, but it's not powerful enough to overcome a bad game. Just look at what happened to the Call of Duty and Battlefield franchises. I think it's doing so well because they nailed the execution. The graphics are great. The game hasn't had any opening week di…

I mentioned many other great games in this genre which were lucky to have 1/100th of the success of this game. But okay, those didn't have the multiplayer, or the presentation, or the accessibility. But Larian's previous game was extremely similar to this one in all respects. It's not even that flippant to say BG3 is DOS2 with the lore and rules swapped for DnD ones which isn't that much of a practical difference (I'…

I love DOS2, but BG3 is SO much more polished in just about every aspect, better visuals, better writing, better combat, that I expect this accounts for a lot of the difference.

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

#163

Post by mlinhares »

TillE wrote: post #57
handmadeta wrote: post #27

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…

Sure there's no general formula, but it's really not a surprise that the first big D&D videogame in a long time would be a huge success, after several years of tabletop D&D skyrocketing in popularity.

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.

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

#164

Post by Detrytus »

xwdv wrote: post #47

Any time someone gives me some max capacity estimate to aim for, I multiply it by 10 and design the system for that. That’s 10x developer thinking.

Maybe I missed something in the article, but they do not mention any technical issues caused by the 7x number of players, they are just expressing their surprise with the game popularity. So it seems IT team followed your advice?

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

#165

Post by 59nadir »

yownie wrote: 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 your own arbitration (what's the point if mostly everything is P2P/high trust sessions and cooperative?)

- ...

700k players is great for them and by all accounts they seem to have done a great job overall, but it's a far cry from League of Legends or even DotA2 in terms of system stress.

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

#166

Post by theduder99 »

bitcharmer wrote: post #75
offtwit wrote: post #46

Is this game mostly an inventory management game like Divinity Original Sin 2? I tried playing it but I was just clicking around menus 80% of the time.

I don't think you played it at all

This is a well-known criticism of the game though. Even putting rune mgmt and crafting aside, after dinging a new level, you should be hitting up the vendor and upgrading/selling gear so that you can deal with enemies at your new level effectively. And you do that process x4 because you are managing 4 characters. I personally didn't mind the ceremony too much but I can definitely see how some people would be put off by it.

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

#167

Post by majormajor »

Novosell wrote: post #128
majormajor wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nintendo? but that's more "publisher who curates external- or internal-studios who largely stay in the same genre each"

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.

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

#168

Post by MattRix »

mlinhares wrote: post #163
TillE wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure there's no general formula, but it's really not a surprise that the first big D&D videogame in a long time would be a huge success, after several years of tabletop D&D skyrocketing in popularity.

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.

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

#169

Post by hfhdjdks »

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…

The GP is analyzing some dimensions to figure out if the success of Baldur's Gate is surprising or not. He/she finds that, given the limited dimensions we can consider, the success is surprising.

I read your reply as saying "no, it's not possible to analyze why games fails / succeed, because they're all different". I feel that's usually unhelpful: assuming we can't explain things because they're all idiosyncratic is usually not productive. It's more productive if you, for example, point to something extra that is missing.

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

#170

Post by imbnwa »

jakebasile wrote: post #21
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 like the CRPG genre a lot, but I think one reason that BG3 is taking off is that it _looks_ like a modern AA(A?) game while the rest look basically like Baldur's Gate did in 1998. BG3 lets you see the world in a lot more detail and it helps immerse you in Faerûn. Many people will claim "graphics don't matter", but the reality is that they do help.

>Many people will claim "graphics don't matter", but the reality is that they do help.

Yeah, it was hard for me to get into Path of Exile over D3 and D4, despite being a technically 'deeper' game

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