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 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.
Those damn gamers and their expectations of receiving a quality product they pay for!
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.
What infra do they need? It's an offline game except for cross-saves.
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
Of all player deaths, 12% were caused by friendly fire. Nice spellcasting there, Dave!
I feel attacked.
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:
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Are things too strong and the player is dying too much? Too weak and the majority of players breeze through difficult sections?
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Are players getting lost/stuck? Are there softlocks or progression blockers?
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Where do players stop playing the game? Can we work out why those areas are more likely to stop playing?
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Are players going to certain areas? Are important areas being skipped? Are areas without a lot of content seeing more traffic than expected?
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What kinds of builds are players trying? Why are they playing those builds? Do they change builds midway through? Why?
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What NPCs are the players talking to? How do they interact with those NPCs?
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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.
There's coop, although I assume it's just peer to peer.
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!
LOL well Larian made sure we were both happy with K&M or controller.
Did your conjured animal get attacked? My summoned quasit has invisibility.
No, my cat passed without going hostile, but it was a L4 Ogre, so, ya know. I even meowed at her; she responded, but did not attack.
I haven't even tried my quasit yet!
The game is too good. It's like crack. I have to work today.
I have to work too. Still think of stuff I want to do in Faerun though. There are caves to explore.
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!
So there's our contribution!
What an incredible achievement for Larian, and well deserved!
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.
It doesn't happen a lot. And I bet if you did pick this one up, you would finish it.
I’m one of those, been playing non-stop all weekend much to my wife’s chagrin lol
I got my game from Gog, so I guess I'm not in that statistic.
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.
How would GOG know? The attraction of the platform is they hand you the game file and are done with you, no DRM, no tracking, no nothing.
I assume a lot of people that use gog also use gog galaxy. It's nice to know you actually have the game files drm free, but I still prefer having the features in gog galaxy like automatic updates for example.
Well, GOG certainly has sales numbers at least. And Larian certainly knows how many people are playing the game. Just look at the stats they published last Friday.
Presumably that’s the whole point of the absolutely necessary launcher.
"--skip-launcher" is your friend. Supposedly improves in game performance as well. https://www.pcgamer.com/baldurs-gate-3-disable-launcher/
Oh believe me, it was the first thing I looked up after being greeted with the launcher. But good to spread the message, the game is great but god the spam of launchers all over gaming is awful.
Amen. Not sure if the launcher has anything to do with the stats they collect, though. Would be nice to know. But Larian is one of a very few companies I don't mind hoovering up my data.
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...
That makes me sad. But I guess there was a reason I chose to install via Steam on launch day instead of GOG. But as I said, I do prefer the platform. I played all of early access on GOG without a hitch.
Curiosity, why do you prefer GOG? I haven't used it much.
I think many like the DRM free games. I have gotten a few very old games (Ultima series, Neverwinter) from them. I like to use Steam over GOG because of the Big Picture Mode and Proton. I even added GOG Neverwinter to my non-Steam games to be able to access it with Big Picture Mode.
Oh and I played ALL day yesterday and today on Steam. So I am counted.
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.
Nice. I can't afford it, but if I could I'd give a copy to my roommate. He's been looking forward to this game for years but rent is too damn high.
Share your library with him and play in offline mode. Or do couch coop.
Baldur's Gate 3
All things BG3!
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a story-rich, party-based RPG set in the universe of Dungeons & Dragons, where your choices shape a tale of fellowship and betrayal, survival and sacrifice, and the lure of absolute power. (Website)
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