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!
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.
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.