What I love is that means this game would have been a success at 100k concurrent. That makes this a runaway success. Hopefully other triple As are paying attention to what Larian is doing.
Releasing an early access game as a full release? Other devs are doing that already.
Care to elaborate? The game had an early access and the official release has been incredibly well polished with few bugs that are already being patched out
Plus they limited it to act 1 only. So I don’t get how you could even claim it was a “full release game released as early access”. You literally couldn’t even play the whole game.
But you would have to pay full price as if it was the full game so the fact that it wasn’t the full game is even worse.
I don’t think so. You got the full game when it came out if you preordered, and they even gave every pre order digital deluxe for free. They were also very blatant about what you’re getting in early access (act 1 only, only access to certain classes, way more content to come with the full release).
The game is riddled with game ending bugs. I’ve lost about 5 hours of play time from reloaded saves. Bugs that have been reported in EA are still present.
Missing key RPG fetures that were requested by almost everyone during EA. Such has more PC voice options, ability to change style of character in game and can’t see full class or race level progression before starting.
The game feels too much like a Divinity game and not like a Baldurs Gate game. It’s 100% a reskinned Original Sin. It’s beautiful and has the lore of D&D but it has me longing for the dungeon crawl of BG 1 and 2, planescape, ice wind Dale.
Jump height and distance is insane. Maximum jump height for a running start is 3 feet yet my PC can jump the height of a 2 story building from standing.
Difficulty scale is backwards, the game gets easier the further along you get rather than scaling with you, like the original games.
Classic skills from 5e have been tweeked for no apparent reason other than to fit the reskinned Divinity skills. Skills with no comparable in Divinity, like dodge, were cut.
The ability for other party members to step into conversations is still missing. My fighter should be able to step in and intimidate rather than silently watching off to the side. My character that has buisness with an NPC should be able to jump into the conversation rather then having to select them and talking as party lead.
The spell icons resemble the pictographs of Divinity more than the previous BG games or anything from D&D.
I dunno, I got the early access for half price (of release price) with the 1st act (as advertised), and the full game at no extra cost.
The 1st act alone probably net me ~50+ hours of play, so their beta is better than 90% of AAA releases recently
There have been no discounts on EA.
Oh, I meant I got the early access right when it came out and was only like $30ish
The price of Early Access has not changed on Steam or GOG.
Did you buy it the day it released?
Want to continue to be a pedantic jerk?
Want me to share a receipt?
Sorry you are butthurt people are enjoying a thing. Now shut up
Yes. I bought it day one of release $60 USD.
That’s awesome. Also the lack of micro transactions makes me want to support them more. I kinda wish they had a donate button or something.
The donate button is buying the game and their previous titles.
Especially Divinity 2: Original Sin.
Or gift friends. Then play with them
When you’re out of friends, gift to random strangers!
Awesome idea that I totally just did!
Buy the Divinity games. They’re all good.
I almost never buy a game on opening day for full price. But fuck microtransaction nonsense – as soon as the devs made an official statement about it, I was on board.
Day 1 dlc.
And?
The key is that nothing in that DLC is needed to win the game. In fact, the only real game advantage at all is some camp supplies. The rest is art, character sheets (they’re PDFs), and the soundtrack. It also allows Larian to throw a little extra at the early adopters who bought the game in early access.
“Day 1 dlc” means nothing without context. Not all DLC is pay-to-win.
It’s also not egregious where you get a piece of a game, then have to finish out with dlc. It’s one thing if you get a full game, then some optional add-ons. But we can’t trust the “AAA” game makers to do that. Too much greed.
I don’t know why this sentiment is so popular. It’s a single player game, most single player games don’t have microtransactions… In fact I think it’d be odd and outside the normal if it did
Something something Skyrim horse armor something something….
I wouldnt call it single player
The game has LAN support as well as steam cloud. While it’s designed for single it handles multiplayer extremely well. The only annoyance I’ve ran into is that only one person can interact with a merchant at a time.
Game is designed for multiplayer from the ground up. Its the same engine they used for divinity. All about partying up, but has great single player support too.
Gift me and I’ll enjoy it 😉
I’m open to the idea.
steamcommunity.com/id/renegade1506 if you’re not joking!
You could request they offer something small…maybe cosmetic…within the game that you could buy to support them.
Also they published the game on GOG - so it’s DRM free!
I haven’t played any Baldurs gate before, but the hype has definitely made me look into it.
Definitely seems like a game I’d like, a fantasy RPG, I haven’t always loved turned based combat, so that’s one of my hold ups. What do y’all think of the combat system?
The combat is fairly challenging - it’s easy for one or two bad moves (or bad luck) to kill your whole party in a battle. It also takes a bit to learn the combat system if you haven’t played D&D.
That being said, I love it. Once you get the basics of combat down and get used to playing carefully, it’s a lot of fun and you get to build out the character that you think is both effective and just cool - and there’s probably a way for you to succeed with whatever build you end up making.
If you don’t love turn based combat I’ll say that it will probably feel very dense at first. You end up with 4 different characters with different strengths and weaknesses and each with a bunch of different abilities that have different rules for when and how often you can use them. Turn based means you get the time to make an educated decision about what you want to do next, but it’s a lot of information to juggle.
The combat is fairly challenging - it’s easy for one or two bad moves (or bad luck) to kill your whole party in a battle. It also takes a bit to learn the combat system if you haven’t played D&D.
I’ve always been interested in D&D, but no never played it.
You end up with 4 different characters with different strengths and weaknesses and each with a bunch of different abilities that have different rules for when and how often you can use them.
I have played quite a few games with the party system, so I have so previous knowledge on the strengths and weaknesses of party members, which may help. Thanks for the info!
BG3 would be a good introduction to dnd. 5th edition tabletop plays pretty much the same. notable differences are in how movement is and the obvious aspect of being on more guardrails in a video game. although they still managed to make those guard rails feel near nonexistent.
No problem! It is a lot of information at once but I’ve been having a great time playing it so I’d really recommend it to anyone who thinks it could be interesting.
As someone who hasn’t played a single game remotely close to it before (Titanfall, a little call of duty, Final Fantasy 14, Halo), all I can say is PLAY IT. It’s disorienting at first but once you play it for an hour you’ll like it, and after three you won’t he able to pit it down.
I personally like it very much, it feels dynamic?, for a lack of a better word, despite it being turn based.
However most encounters can be avoided, via conversation, choices, environment kills etc. So you don’t need to fight much, if you don’t end up liking it. ^(*as of act 2/3)
Pacifist playthrough 100% when?
If you’re unsure if it will be for you, pick up divinity original sin 2, same maker and very similar style, but (a) without the d&d license and (b) will cost much much less. Both BG3 and DOS2 are incredible games which you can easily pour a hundred hours into
DOS2 is my favorite RPG ever. The game uses tactics and positioning far better than any other RPG I’ve tried.
The AI uses it a bit TOO well and too much, imo. It always find some impossible angle to fire at me.
Also got annoying with surface magic effects. AI covered the battlefield in it. Particularly that super-fire that one needed a limited spell to remove. BG3 has a better balance between combat and surface elements. At least so far in the game.
The combat system is classic but with tactical Larian improvements from their other games.
I like it, but you can definitely get burned out from really long combat sessions. You can always lower the difficulty and blast your way through it, though.
Outside the combat, how have you liked the game?
Apart from a few glitches here and there, the game feels really complete. The story is really well made and the writing is top tier. If you come for the RPG elements of talking to every NPC and finding a lot of fun dialogue, you’ll love it.
If you want something without combat, although not fantasy, Disco Elysium has become my favorite CRPG ever.
I love headlines like this.
Larian makes such great games. This kind of success means maybe a BG4 somewhere down the line.
I don’t hear much talk of the optimization but the simple fact this is running great on a wide range of devices says a lot of the engineering prowess of the studio. Its amazing how well this game is runningnon my five year old machine. I know thats not too old but some new games make my cooling loop hot and this one doesn’t even make my components work that hard.
Seems like the pre release was more demanding/less optimized. Running Fedora 38 and proton. Combined with the Vulkan option it’s been fantastic. And I think this weird glitch I was having two nights ago has already been patched ʘ‿ʘ
Specs: ryzen 5 1400, 16g ram, and a Radeon 5500xt. I had bumped a few options down on ultra, shadows to medium, and fog medium. Didn’t need to, but it’s helped without any noticeable graphic difference.
Now if we could just let our friends drop-in and out so I don’t have to keeo a separate save/character for them. I played with one yesterday and their character was stuck in my active party after they left.
Honestly I’m not surprised, it looks like something out of the mid 2000s. That’s not to say something bad about it. Graphics don’t make a good game on their own.
Wtf is this? Have you seen the in-engine character expressions? Shit looks phenomenal.
I have added the Baldur’s Gate series to my backlog, I will probably play these in 10-15 years, wish me luck.
Just in time for BG4! (probably)
Odd headline. Seems very rooted in the assumption of online gaming these days to me but then you get in and the article is basically just saying the game is a huge success, which is great news I’m sure we can all agree. :)
I mean yeah, bear sex
Plus Goblin and Ogre sex. THAT was an eye opener.
wait… we can have sex with goblins and ogres? quietly takes furious notes
Goblin slayer would be disapointed in you.
Bugbear, not goblin. A goblin probably could have climbed right in there.
#virile!
I absolutely adore and admire those at Larian studios. Divinity 2 is one of the best games I’ve ever played. I hope I can play BG3 one day since I don’t have the funds for a system that will run it or better yet, it becomes available on Geforce Now or something because I got a damn wedding to pay for and bills to pay!
My buddy has been playing co-op with me using GeForce now and it’s worked great so far
As someone who has played Divinity Original Sin 2 and some of their older titles. You won’t be disappointed, BG3 is phenomenal. Interactions between characters has been massively improved that the added animated cut-scenes when speaking to characters gives them significantly more life. I think I still prefer the combat system in DOS2 but I don’t hate BG3 combat, it’s just different.
750k concurrent players several days after release, quite the feat!
Why is it a problem that IT was not prepared for so many concurrent players? Yes, it has multiplayer, but it’s mostly a single-player game. Did they pull a Diablo?
They didn’t pull a Diablo because you don’t have to wait in a login queue to play single player.
A lot of people are playing with their friends, not just alone
Yeah players can drop in and out of games pretty fast plus there’s stuff like user authentication
Is it not p2p and should barely matter?
This makes me so happy to read. Thanks
That’s wonderful!
I wish my shitty ADHD-OCD mix brain would let me play it instead of doing shit through a system or something. I can’t even play anything I want to cuz I’ll feel bad that I’m not something the universe would want me to
Mate, as soon as you get your shitty ADHD-OCD brain into it then you’ll be hooked. There’s plenty to keep you busy.
You are a human. One of the things humans do is enjoy and have fun. It is in our programming. The universe wants you to enjoy and have fun.
Also, a big things humans do is endurance. Long term action and planning is kinda a thing we can do, while many other species specialize in rapid response. Taking the time to enjoy recharges our batteries so we can be more productive in the long long term.
Supporting systems that help others experience joy and fun (entertainment, the arts, sports recreation), through participation in ways that speak to you, helps all of us recharge our batteries. So our systemic endurance increases.
It’s ok to play. It’s necessary for our survival.
It seems this game has local coop? I was wondering if it was a nice experience for me and my GF
Yes, you can play on a LAN connection, offline assuming you both have your own PCs in the house. There is no split screen multilayer, yet. In fact, this is supposed to be the reason why only the PC version had it’s release date moved up. They didn’t see it as a requirement for the PC release and decided to work on the PS5 split screen issues, post PC release.
So PS5 will definitely have split screen functionality, and I suppose that might also go to PCs as well, but that’s just a guess on my side.
I was just playing split screen multiplayer on PC a couple days ago. Not sure where you heard that PC didn’t have it, if that’s what you’re implying. Seems to be working fine.
Do you need two copies of the game for that?
Thanks a lot for the summary! 🤗
I’m so hoping my husband will play this with me when it comes out on Ps5. He rarely plays games with me - but this one is too fun is to pass up
Get excited. It plays stupidly well with a controller. I changed out my traditional pc desk setup for a recliner/TV setup and mouse and keyboard still get uncomfortable after not much time. Once I tried it with a controller… oh hell yes.
Ooh, yes, even more excited now! The recliner/TV setup seems perfect for this game imo. I bought an original Xbox a while ago just to play Dark Alliance the way I remembered playing back in the day, so this is going to be a huge treat either way
