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.
Didn’t know this stat was public. Cool
Is this the highest it’s ever been? Pretty nuts.
Isn’t this basically the same with every bigger release?
Normally pre-loading helps to even the load. For automatic updates, Steam strategically distributes them to even the load.
There wasn’t a a pre-load for BG3 though, really. It was incompatible with their EA release.
And they had to make a bunch of posts and updates begging people to delete all saves and even completely uninstall the game. Hell, weeks ago they were flat out telling people not to even play it at all.
Which is all so silly. I really hope Valve took notice of all this, since it’s such a huge release. They could definitely do with some improvements to this whole EA -> full release. Even as simple as having an option for two downloads (old EA version you can play now OR prerelease full version you cannot play until x time on y date).
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.
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.
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 even had the download cancel midway through. I honestly can’t remember personally experiencing a game release that brought their servers to its knees. They should’ve really done at least a day of preload time though, that would’ve saved a lot of trouble.
