An ongoing analysis of Steam's player numbers, seeing what's been played the most.
For context, Larian Studio founder Swen Vincke predicted that the game could reach 100,000 peak concurrent users during its debut period, and that was a fairly optimistic prediction. I work in IT, and really feel for those folks. I hope they designed their infrastructure to scale!
And that's only Steam, not including GOG, or the influx of PS5 users next month. Let's take it to 1 million!
As a Linux user I am all in on supporting Steam. They are the reason I was able to comfortably leave Windows. And I like their Big Picture Mode to browse my games and then I can use my controller and big TV to game.
Hell yes. Proton is huge, and Big Picture Mode is basically a console. I feel you on the controller support. With your encouragement, I finally connected a PS4 controller to my PC, and SEAMLESSLY explored a hostile area as a conjured cat. Amazing. (Still not giving up M+K, though....) Cheers!
Really seems like they hit a nerve with this game, which seems to be that people want these giant RPGs with tons of quests, choices and companions, but also want them to have actual cutscenes and not just textboxes as far as presentation goes. Probably helps that this is like the first AAA CRPG like this since like Dragon Age: Origins, which came out 14 goddamn years ago. I don't quite think the overwhelming praise the game has gotten is quite warranted, since it just doesn't seem inspired to be more than a good DnD campaign, but at that it is really good and manages to be just polished and streamlined to be a hit (even though parts of it feel undercooked and janky, like the map or the inventory system).
Why would it want to be more than a good DnD campaign? That’s exactly what Larian hoped it would be, and pretty much what it is. It’s not as open-ended as a real campaign can be, but given the scale and quality of the content, it’s really something special. It’s only the best dnd game ever made.
I don't question the quality of the game, I just don't feel that just doing Baldur's Gate again, twenty years later, really warrants ALL of the hype. Like the games from that time people still talk about, like Planescape Torment, Arcanum, even something like Fallout 2 or somewhat later Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines are games that are just a bit more "out there". Baldur's Gate feels comparably more vanilla compared to those. It's full of tropes and it does them well, but as far as I've played it doesn't always manage to rise above them and even from a design standpoint it is not that much different from original Baldurs Gate games.
I guess this is more of a lament about the state of the industry right now, but the fact that twenty years of gaming evolution leads to just doing the same types of games again but doesn't really fill me with that much excitement.
This the exact kind of hyperbole the thread op was just talking about. The "best d&d game ever made" is a highly subjective opinion. The amount of content is being massively overrated by the hype. Yeah, it's a solid amount, but BG2 had more content than this game 20 years ago especially when it comes to dialogue, since people can't be bothered to read without a voice actor doing it for them.
I'm really enjoying it but I'm also tired of how ridiculous and aggressively cultish fanboys get during the post release period. The game is far from perfect.
I think part of it is that it's a single-player RPG (or co-op if you want) with a focus on the story experience. No mmo-lite features, battlepasses, always online requirements, live service, etc. bloat to be found. A concept that the current AAA market seems to be allergic to.
It says what it is on the tin and delivers that. That's a breath of fresh air for many people right now.
Also, there was that whole drama with devs complaining about how BG3 was going to ruin it for everybody else by making gamers expect a higher quality product from studios. Which isn't really what those devs were saying, but it's what it came off as to people, and that probably gave the game a lot more positive attention than it probably otherwise would've gotten.
Not that I strongly disagree with you, but did you see the map in early access? Ha! And at least we got a few things fixed in the inventory system since EA. Sorting and multi-select are key for a hoarder like me. They took so much feedback from early access and fixed most of the worst things they could. But I've been playing since patch 0, so....
Any game that gets anywhere close to being a good DnD campaign is Gold in my book. But yeah; certainly still lots of bits are undercooked and janky.
There is still stuff in here that other games have managed to fix like a decade ago, like being able to access all your characters inventory in the camp, having a place where all the books and texts you've read are collected, automatically picking up gold or merging the inventories of enemies when their bodies are close together. The quest log is just a void filled with text, without any flavor or convenience whatsoever, no way to click on a quest and see where the quest marker is or anything like that. Same with the map, there's no worldmap that shows the location of the individual maps on some larger scale that would help you orient yourself, no way to even switch between the different maps and all the fast travel points are just in one giant list. Also even in singleplayer I've not found an actual way to pause this game. For a game that was in early access for three years, these feel like basic things that never got the second round of polish they deserved.
I still think having it fully voiced makes it lighter than it could be if conversations were entirely text. Even the longest speeches in BG3 pale in comparison to random idle banter found in a tavern of BG2. There's just more of it. More dialogue, more lore, more background... If they could do that, and still have that density, that but still be fully voiced, that would be the dream.
Personally, I don't mind reading and I wish we'd get more games that don't require voice acting for everything. It'd allow them to do so much more with a lot less. I do think at some point we'll get that that point with synthesized voices, but it isn't quite there yet. I've used several in Ludum Dare games, and they sound great but not perfect. Still, even as they are if they let devs write more and create more options, I'd take it. Adding options with voice acting balloons work required fast, so that's why it's so often fake choice but the other person (or, in FO4, the player character even) responds similarly no matter what you pick.
Would need to lean on AI for something like that, I think. Keep the normal human-acted main cast/supporting characters, delegate everything else to AI.
The first thing that comes to mind is the sheer number of crash reports they were getting early on. I know I submitted probably two dozen myself those first few days. Game is rock solid for me now, though.
The second thing that comes to mind is that they are clearly sucking up a whole lot of data around gameplay. The stats they published on Friday about how people played opening weekend was eye opening to me regarding the amount of data they are ingesting: https://steamcommunity.com/games/1086940/announcements/detail/6199820457241938860
For what it's worth - I work in the AAA game industry. Every AAA game collects those kinds of metrics, even "singleplayer only" ones.
They answer a few questions:
Are things too strong and the player is dying too much? Too weak and the majority of players breeze through difficult sections?
Are players getting lost/stuck? Are there softlocks or progression blockers?
Where do players stop playing the game? Can we work out why those areas are more likely to stop playing?
Are players going to certain areas? Are important areas being skipped? Are areas without a lot of content seeing more traffic than expected?
What kinds of builds are players trying? Why are they playing those builds? Do they change builds midway through? Why?
What NPCs are the players talking to? How do they interact with those NPCs?
What do gamers do over the course of the lifetime of a game? What do hardcore passionate fans like? What do casual players like?
These sorts of data points are really critical for things like future patches or DLC. They help point out the places in the game that need love and adjustment going forward. (For example, how many people romance Karlach vs. Shadowheart? How many people go for the Underdark vs. the Mountain Pass? How many people investigate the Creche vs. skip Gith stuff entirely?)
For example - in a game I worked on, we saw a spike in players quitting the game at the section where they needed to crouch for the first time. This meant either crouch wasn't being taught well, crouch controls weren't intuitive, or something broke. A subsequent patch changed the crouch tutorial and the spike of players quitting went away.
Every single moment that is spent working on the game has a cost. The job of production is to ensure that development resources are spent in places that give the biggest bang for the buck. Places like the tutorial or early missions are super duper hyper important because 100% of players will see them. As things diverge, fewer segments of players see them - some players quit entirely, while others commit to one section of content over the other. You want to figure out where "most" players go and focus there, only moving down once those areas are fixed.
For example, 1/3 of players choose evil. So 1/3 of the time should be spent on the evil path, because why invest 75% of resources into something that 66% of players won't ever see? You still need something there, but when you need to make decisions, production (and publishers!) only drive decisions based on data.
Community feedback is biased. The loudest minority are the ones who choose to give feedback online. These are players who are highly invested in the game, much more than a "typical" player. But they represent a relatively small chunk of the player base - 5-10%, on the high end - and not a representative sample at that. While community feedback is important (and does drive many decisions, if only to make sure the Internet doesn't get mad), it isn't "good enough" for dev teams to focus on it exclusively. The numbers guys work in numbers, not sentiment.
So the data basically is used to say "Look: players are romancing XYZ more than we expected. We should invest more resources into making sure that their romance is rewarding" and if that's true it's likely that production will greenlight some dev time to work on that.
It can also be used for "Hey, players are seeing framerate drops in these areas, consistently. Can we have a patch that improves framerate here?" and production will balance that against everything else (how many more sales will be made by raising the quality bar and fixing the framerate in this spot?), create tickets, and triage them out for a future patch.
Then if Larian works on Baldur's Gate 4, data from Baldur's Gate 3 can help drive decisions. Should the dev team invest resources in a better character creator? What areas are really resonating with players - and how can a sequel replicate that? What areas were more disappointing than the dev team expected, and how can they be fixed? (For example, the devs seem surprised that the community has rejected Giths as much as they have - this isn't too surprising from the outside looking in, but it's easy to be blinded and lose sight of things like this when you work on a project for 4-5 years with dev goggles on.)
This is all super duper common data to collect, on any game. I wouldn't read too much into it; Larian is just being more open than most by sharing selections of that data with the community.
I don't have much time to play but I managed to play during peak with a friend who bought me the game (money's tight with a kid on the way). Our duo play a nude halfling divorcee monk (midlife crisis!) and his buddy dwarf barbarian who's going nude too. He's happily married with kids, selling smoked meats--- at least, until their abduction anyway!
I had no way to justify buying this one. I own a bunch of CRPG that I haven't finished, as well as jrpg on the backlog.
But I am so very glad for everyone who enjoys BG3. It's good to see a franchise taken to the next level without getting bastardized. It doesn't happen a lot.
Honestly I bought it a week later to make sure it wasn't a lemon. I am glad I got it though. My wife and I play it together and it's the first game in a long while we both enjoy and play together. It has been over a decade since I have been this time invested in a game and not regretted it later.
Not necesarily. The thing I'm struggling with in BG3 is that I just don't like any of my party mates. I've got no interest in playing an evil playthrough, yet most of my party members are either outright evil, or simply self interested. We're not saving anything, we're not fighting for something bigger. We're just throw together by chance and are working on solving our shared predicmanet.
I'm just not invested in most of them or their stories, and the backstory for the background I chose has me doing evil things sometimes against my will. And all of my tough choices I get to make about exploring my history amount of "become more evil for power". I don't want to do evil things. I don't enjoy that game style
The game is amazing. But the story isn't coming close to grabbing me in the same way previous BG stories did, or the way the pathfinder NPCs did.
I can't find any GOG stats. Doesn't seem like they offer any numbers. I bought the game on Steam, GOG and also the collectors edition, and gave that steam key away. I'm currently only playing on Steam, but I do want to get BG3 up and running on GOG as I do prefer that platform.
Good luck with that. I bought it on gog, had to jump through hoops to have it install, only to have the download stall again the next day on a patch. They have to get their act together, I just wanted to play so got a refund and bought it on steam where it downloaded, installed and patched without a hitch...
I had never played a turn-based RPG before BG3; and I had zero knowledge of DnD systems, besides the little I'd gleaned almost by osmosis via memes.
Wasn't sure if this game was for me, also wasn't sure if the two hour refund window would be enough to find out; I got out the pirate patch & peg leg to find out. As another commenter said this game is like crack.... well deserving of £50 so I bought it yesterday. I was always too intimidated by the deep systems to join any local DnD outings as a fumbling noob, but wondering if this game might have opened me up to it! Wouldn't that be ironic, a single player RPG (I know you can multi but I don't) getting me outside and socialising.