From Steam’s self-published stats.
Baldur’s Gate 3 could not be preloaded and weighed in at 125 gigabytes on disk, so when the game left Early Access at 11am US Eastern yesterday, Steam’s bandwidth utilization shot up 8x over a span of 30 minutes. I know personally, I saw my download hit over 600 Mbps across a 1 Gbps fiber connection.
Kudos to the system engineers at Valve. It is mind-boggling that they have built infrastructure that robust.
It’s always amusing to me when a game has a huge download size but is also an overhead view game and you probably can’t even get the camera close enough to the world objects to see the full texture detail.
That was always my confusion about people buying skins in league of legends or dota. I can barely see them!
Not true, you definitely can with the right resolution. LoL wild rift especially is close enough (being mobile) you can absolutely make out the skins. They’re usually flashy and noticable enough everyone can tell what it is, too. They often have special animations, auras, attacks look different, etc. Some have special voice lines.
Like, just as an example, if you’re an actual walking tumor and play Teemo, but get the bumblebee skin, the little mushroom traps he leaves around become beehives.
Also remember League and DotA are big steaming games, and matches are repayable, so getting in with different camera angles on replay is very muxh a thing.
Camera isn’t stuck in isometric view. You can zoom, pan, tilt and see all the fantastic detail.
The original Dawn of War ruined isometric games for me since it allowed the pan and zoom, with mods allowing even more zooming in an out. BG3 having that ability has my interest peaked!
Please, please don’t take this as any insult or criticism, but for future reference, it’s “piqued”.
This particular homophone is almost as devious as “milquetoast”. (Sounds like “milk toast”)
Edit: someone beat me to it and now I feel like a jerk for piling on. Sorry!
A lot of older games were bigger because of static assets. Riven (myst 2) was fucking huge because it was like 60,000 jpgs. It was on 5 discs. Later games running in a 3D engine just had texture files and small models, they were a lot smaller.
There’s that quake 2 clone that team did a while back that was only 92KB- it generated everything in memory on the fly. Krieger I think it was called?
I wouldn’t say it’s overhead. When you zoom a bit it’s more like a third party view, except you can move the camera around.
And still only 0.1% of players have ‘Descent from Avernus’
Are you even playing the game?
Exactly my case, downloaded yesterday so I can play all weekend. Don’t have but an hour to play during the work week. Definitely not starting this game with just an hour.
Steam would profit from integrating something like the bittorrent protocol for downloads imo
Thank you and please not. I value my upload for myself. At best make it an opt-in!
While true, us asymmetric broadband customers (where my upload is 1/10th my download) are grateful this is not the case:D
Not to be a crypto bro but this is the kind of thing that cryptocurrency could be really good for. I mean that or just credit for games because maybe giving people an easier way to money launder on steam isnt a good idea
Blizzard’s Downloader used torrents.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-legal-uses-for-bittorrent-youd-be-surprised/
Off the top of my head, I know Windows Update and the Battle.net launcher both do this
Do you have any source or article about this? I’d love to hear more about this.
Microsoft’s implementation of the feature is called Windows Update Delivery Optimization.
Here’s a short optimisation guide: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows-delivery-optimization.html
Fundamentally it’s not like the Bittorrent protocol, even though there are similar behaviours and the result is the same. Microsoft retains the ability to stop the network from seeding updates and has ways of only targeting specific supported configurations to receive new updates.
And on Windows it’s so poorly implemented they had to reserve 20% of bandwidth for updates being uploaded and downloaded and you don’t get a choice on that. So when Windows is sharing its updates your internet access suffers.
Jokes on windows, my WiFi is just funky enough that transfers between devices on LAN run like dogshit so it gives up before it even starts!
…I really need to invest the time into finding & implementing a better network solution
it is already partially implemented for local network transfers.
There’s no reason this game should be this large, it’s ridiculous.
And here’s me, getting it on GOG where it’s DRM free.
This game is gonna be on one of my USB sticks for yeeeeears.
Yeah you can get some nippy ones these days, faster than an HDD so arguably suitable to run off of. Only thing I’ve noticed is that fast USB sticks can saturate a pair of ports on a lot of devices - if you have, say, a mouse in the other port then the movement might get stuttery when transferring at full pace.
Steam version is still technically DRM free, just don’t have Steam running when you run the executable.
Yeah most games on Steam run just fine without Steam. You can shortcut the exe if you want to.
You can also install it to any drive/USB you want to and use it from there for years, with or without Steam.
GoG is great, don’t get me wrong. But the things OP is celebrating it for have been doable on Steam for a very long time now.
