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

    (www.forbes.com)
    400 points redbell | 14 comments | 06 Aug 23 15:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.983s | source | bottom
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    mastax ◴[06 Aug 23 16:47 UTC] No.37023856[source]▶
    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 (if not time to play them).

    - The Early Access release for this game was wildly popular beyond the developer's expectations, and maintained interest for years.

    I definitely underestimated the brand power of DnD and Baldur's Gate because they aren't very important to me, personally. But also there have been a load of really good CRPGs in recent years and there seemed to be a pretty low ceiling to how much interest they could get. Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and a few others were amazing and beloved CRPG games but were lucky to have a tenth of the success of BG3. But those games were generally less accessible, mostly not multiplayer, and again lacked the brand power.

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    1. flohofwoe ◴[06 Aug 23 16:57 UTC] No.37023996[source]▶
    > big cohort of millennials...

    I feel slightly offended being thrown into the same pot as those weird millenials ;)

    Absolutely everybody who owned a PC for gaming in the late 90's played BG1 and BG2, no matter the age. Video games are not just for teenagers you know.

    replies(5): >>37024386 #>>37024768 #>>37025780 #>>37025860 #>>37026875 #
    2. pixelpoet ◴[06 Aug 23 17:24 UTC] No.37024386[source]▶
    I'm about 40 and am usually grouped as a millennial (at least for the common purpose of blame, e.g. killing cinemas), though I somehow missed Baldur's Gate; played the hell out of the Ultima series though!
    replies(2): >>37024506 #>>37026596 #
    3. torgian ◴[06 Aug 23 17:36 UTC] No.37024506[source]▶
    This is something I wish could come back. Ultima was a great series, and I even liked the trash heaps that were Ultima 8 and 9.

    Unfortunately, EA still holds the rights. The new mmo-ish game that Garriet made is one I have not really dived into yet

    replies(1): >>37026451 #
    4. aoanla ◴[06 Aug 23 18:01 UTC] No.37024768[source]▶
    I had a gaming PC in the late 90s and absolutely did not play BG1 or 2. I briefly tried PlaneScape: Torment several years after its release on the urging of one of its fans, but didn't make it past the early parts due to being annoyed by the random thugs that would assault you if you stood still for too long, and the pseudo-realtime 2e-based combat being Byzantine and off-putting.
    replies(1): >>37025406 #
    5. adastra22 ◴[06 Aug 23 19:05 UTC] No.37025406[source]▶
    Yeah I haven’t played a game other than Minecraft in two decades, although I was a huge gamer in my teens. Never touched BG.
    6. tda ◴[06 Aug 23 19:41 UTC] No.37025780[source]▶
    I have games plenty, but had never even heard about the Valeurs Gate franchise until last week. I must have been in a different bubble with Dune 2, Red Alert, Some City 2000, Tomb Raider, GTA3, Dungeon master and probably some more that I can't recall now. But the whole fantasy RPG wasn't really my thing I guess
    replies(2): >>37025833 #>>37026579 #
    7. Ekaros ◴[06 Aug 23 19:46 UTC] No.37025833[source]▶
    I think only GTA 3 is contemporary to it. Others are earlier games, which might explain things.
    replies(1): >>37026077 #
    8. RHSeeger ◴[06 Aug 23 19:49 UTC] No.37025860[source]▶
    While I think "everybody" is stretching it... the general idea here is accurate. From my memory, the first two "rounds" of good D&D games on the PC were the SSI games (Eye of the Beholder, Pools of Radiance, etc) and then Baldur's Gate. Both of those series, when they came out, set the bar for D&D RPG games (and RPG games in general, to some extent). If you played that type of game, you played those games (and likely Bards Tale and Wizardry).

    To this day, there are quotes that live on from Baldur's Gate ("Go for the eyes, Boo!"). It has place in a lot of people's hearts. Had BG3 been bad, it would have been a horror show of hate for the developer. But it looks like they delivered, and the adoring fans of decades ago appreciate that.

    replies(1): >>37027539 #
    9. tda ◴[06 Aug 23 20:09 UTC] No.37026077{3}[source]▶
    I thought all these games were end of nineties, but I didn't check and am not so good at this. Anyways, I never stopped gaming since
    10. TillE ◴[06 Aug 23 20:41 UTC] No.37026451{3}[source]▶
    The Ultimas were (mostly) wonderful, especially Ultima 7, but I don't think there's anything particularly valuable about the "IP".

    It was really about Garriott exploring innovative ways in how to translate the tabletop RPG experience into a computer game. You don't need an Avatar or Britannia to pursue ideas like Ultima 4's virtue system or Ultima 7's interactivity.

    11. Agingcoder ◴[06 Aug 23 20:50 UTC] No.37026579[source]▶
    I agree with you, but eventually realized there was a specific reason. RPGs at that time were much less immersive, so much so that I had no interest whatsoever in the genre. And no I neither enjoyed eye of the beholder 2, nor lands of lore, nor ultima underworld , nor ultima, nor baldurs gate.

    Modern rpgs ( Witcher 3, dos2, etc), on the contrary, are amazing : technology has finally caught up, and my mind no longer has to compensate for the rather bland visual/sounds/lack of voices/limited freedom/etc.

    I used to play dune2, red alert, sim city, etc but these days I play rpgs !

    12. lamontcg ◴[06 Aug 23 20:52 UTC] No.37026596[source]▶
    > played the hell out of the Ultima series though!

    this is Wizardry III erasure.

    (i'm a bit older and solidly GenX)

    13. caskstrength ◴[06 Aug 23 21:17 UTC] No.37026875[source]▶
    > Absolutely everybody who owned a PC for gaming in the late 90's played BG1 and BG2, no matter the age.

    Maybe among your friends? Sales numbers don't back that up and anecdotally among my friends and classmates barely anyone played BG, but everyone played Quake, StarCraft, Diablo, Need For Speed, etc. Even among RPGs Morrowing and Fallout were much more popular and accessible back in the day.

    14. aoanla ◴[06 Aug 23 22:24 UTC] No.37027539[source]▶
    Eh, I am an exception - I played Eye of the Beholder a bit (but never completed it), and I had Bard's Tale (and never completed it), but I never got the Baldur's Gate games (despite being an active computer gamer at the time, and liking TTRPGs). To be fair, though, that's partly because my experience in not being able to finish the above too games due to the difficulty of the combat put me off CRPGs almost completely (until the more recent era of combatless or near-combatless RPGs with things like Disco Elysium).