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

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 by owlcat. It’s just so samey.

I will grant, Larian’s divinity 2 did feel a bit different. They managed to make combat feel more interesting. And playing split screen with the wife made it much more enjoyable. Optimistic they’ve done it again here.

> I think this is about on par with expectations with a bigger brand.

No, this is wildly beyond expectations. They sold 2.5M copies of BG3 in Early Access (>500k in July alone) which is already amazing, but one might have expected it to eat into their launch day numbers as most of the fans already bought in during EA. Instead it it looks like they probably sold ~10M more copies just in the 3 days after launch.

Yeah the Divinity: Original Sin 2 combat system had the huge emphasis on elemental effects and surfaces and interactions which I found a lot more fun than the traditional RPG systems which feel more like solving a math equation.

So far there has been a lot less of that in BG3 which is disappointing but maybe I just need to level up my spellcasters more. (I hate the DnD spell preparation system but that's another matter)

The element interaction from Divinity: Original Sin 2 are still there. Grease works and will catch fire, you can get ice spike and it'll create an ice surface where enemies and players will slip, then turn into a puddle next turn. They will also slip on a sufficiently large puddle of blood. The intro ship has vats of mysterious liquid that will catch fire.

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 matter. In BG3 you can actually be the evil character so that by itself lends the game at least for 2 playthroughs. Personally I am playing it through as Dark Urge first, and later going to do another run with good druid.

Also the graphics are really nice, almost everything is voice acted, companions have interesting stories. Story is already much better than divinity 2. I have 39 hours in now and I bought it at launch

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.

Its the brand. DnD had a major grow in the last years. DnD live play shows are getting their own animated series produced by amazon prime video. It became huge. There is your divinity 2 delta.

> 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 early access for everybody to try since 2020 (so most hardcore fans most likely bought the game already in early access), and yet the launch exceeded the wildest expectations.

This means that Larian must have done an exceptionally great job of balancing the expections of their hardcore fanbase and the general RPG audience.

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.

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.

Huh. Interesting. Grease in kingmaker is probably the most powerful early game spell. I would think this translates to Baldurs gate too. Not so much in real world dnd where there will be fewer enemies and more theatre of mind.

Making it flammable sounds very powerful.

utilizing elements is a little bit less useful in Baldur's gate because of the action economy. In divinity you had action points where you move things around with telekenesis and light them on fire in one turn, it's harder to get the ball rolling in BG3