Submitted 2 years ago by scops@reddthat.com to games@lemmy.world
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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.
And that was just one copy.
That’s nothing. My coworkers node_modules directory will soon require their own NAS and dedicated 10Gbps circuits.
if one day it came out that node_modules were invented by western digital to sell more hard drives i wouldnt be surprised in the slightest
node_modules directory
I need better glasses; my first read through I thought that was his nude_models directory and I wondered, exactly, where do you work?
Imagine the number of bad peer dependences
Jfc, what kind of website are they working on needing such an immense amount of different packages?
“coworker”
And it still gave me 800Mbps consistently right at launch time. Good servers.
Steam has some of the most consistent and high quality servers around. It’s quite rare to see them slow down or go down, at least in my experience.
I can’t think of a time steam was down (for me personally, I know outages happen) that wasn’t planned and announced well ahead of time
And I’ve got a lot of hours on steam
so high quality that they go down for maintenance every Tuesday…
And at best only during specific sales like the Steam deck their servers became unresponsive for a bit.
I wonder how much they paid for that launch bandwith.
Steam has a 30% cut, so, that pays
Because they use Akamai as a CDN.
Crys in low internet speed
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.
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!
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?
riven was huge because it deserved the space.
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.
Yeah looks similar to Divinity Original Sin 2. I installed a camera mod on that so I could get lower and closer, but that of course caused some weirdness in the skybox.
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 is close enough (being mobile) you can absolutely make out the skin. 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 bumblebee hives.
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.
You can use the scroll wheel to zoom in pretty darn close! Closer than you probably ever need to.
You can actually zoom into a Mass Effect style over the shoulder camera position if you want.
Steam would profit from integrating something like the bittorrent protocol for downloads imo
While true, us asymmetric broadband customers (where my upload is 1/10th my download) are grateful this is not the case:D
It could be opt-in with rewards for toggling it on.
didnt think of that
it is already partially implemented for local network transfers.
They do have such system, but only works for clients in the same lan.
I’ve often wondered if this works if you use a VPN or not?
Blizzard’s Downloader used torrents.
Thank you and please not. I value my upload for myself. At best make it an opt-in!
It’s typically a soft switch in the config for capable clients.
Off the top of my head, I know Windows Update and the Battle.net launcher both do this
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.
Do you have any source or article about this? I’d love to hear more about this.
I’m pleasantly surprised how many people are playing this game. I figured that DnD although popular, was still kinda a niche. Yet this is topping Steam charts which is great to see. Hopefully it means more of this quality to come, there is obviously a big market for it.
I can’t wait to get home and get stuck in!
With how popular the Divinity Original Sin series is I would be surprised if the game wasn’t as popular as it is. Larian knows how to make a fucking great crpg.
I still think it’s impressive and unexpected though. Divinity never broke 100k players even which I assume is the second highest cRPG player count.
For a game to go over 5x bigger on Steam than any other game of its genre? Thats impressive.
Didn’t know this stat was public. Cool
In that spike my download speed went from 80 to 2 Mbps, I tried right after with another game, got 80 again. Baldur’s Gate really strained their network
Precisely why data caps for fixed-line broadband was an extremely brain-dead idea to begin with.
Not the right place to ask, or maybe to be seen. But I watched ACG’s video on this and I LOVE the classes and how meat n potatoes they are. No guffy [what I call] Horde style shit like Necromancer or whatever.
I’ve only ever played DnD once IRL in a discord and some online board thing, but I enjoyed the dice rolling and how posistioning worked. Is it a bit of xcom meets diablo if I twisted your arm to compare to another game genre? A friend and I tried that Gloomhaven game and we HATED it lol, but this looks a little more engaging at least from a very first glance.
Plus a few friends have picked it up, so i’m not sure if I could join their game to help kinda like we did with D4 which was super fun.
It’s quite different from both in the way that the skills can have position mechanics for some like backstab (rogue class, least I am pretty sure they can backstab), or persuade/intimidate to sway conversant to your objective, but still xcom related in the way that each character has a turn where they can do a variety of multiple things in a turn. Diablo is only similar in that it has skills but an extremely different paced game. Positioning is important for spells, unless I am misremembering, because AOE in DnD doesn’t care who’s in the area, so you don’t want to cast fireball when your party members are within the area.
Turn actions are broken down into their own categories like action / quick action which each has their own amount of (though usually a similar amount but after some levels some classes can hit/attack multiple times, this is needed for martial classes). The combat is turn related once started but you can often get characters into positions before starting combat (this may need stealth for some because once certain enemies see you they start combat). There is a bigger emphasis on role playing (conversation) choices in the game that can impact encounters, either with the current conversant or down the line. Certain actions like getting caught stealing will impact things too CRPGs are their own genre, have more in common with other Larian games (divinity original sin) or games like Pathfinder, and of course the older DnD games. The rules takes some knowledge and getting used to but not overly difficult, you can download a free edition of the DnD 5th editions rules which may help too(not 100% accurate but close enough). If you have friends I think you’ll enjoy playing with them as you figure out your strategies from battle to conversations but it’s a slower paced game. Just don’t ignore things that can boost out of combat abilities to persuade (skill) or stealth that can give other opportunities while playing, though you can probably just play a murder everyone party if it works for you.
If you enjoy a quicker paced game though this isn’t your game is all, it’s slow and there can be a lot of time spent checking chests, talking and wandering. If you enjoy story and some tactical combat this is a good choice in my opinion.
XCOM meets Diablo is a decent enough way of putting it, as long as you don’t expect the mechanics to be 1:1. Since you brought up positioning, there’s no grid for movement, or flanking, for example. Battles are turn-based, like XCOM, but it’s not split in player turn and AI turn, instead, each individual character/npc gets its own turn, with the order decided based on dice rolls and whatever modifiers are applicable.
If it out out then? Nice. I’ll wait for it to go on sale though. I’m poor AF.
You’re welcome over at patient gamers!
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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.
I absolutely contributed to that and bought it day one.
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.
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.
Time to buy a 256GB stick for it lol
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.
2.25 Terabytes per second for regular use? Thats actually not that bad considering its the entirety of steam. I kind of want to see those numbers for youtube.
I have a friend who worked at a rural ISP serving communities with only a couple hundred residents each. He told me they have a 10Gbit backbone with failover and some customers on gigabit connections, but most are served over DSL/Cable. So 10Gbit x2 over-provisioned maybe 10-20x? I just found those hard numbers for how an ISP is setup very interesting
So that’s why my download took 15 hours.
And still only 0.1% of players have ‘Descent from Avernus’
Are you even playing the game?
Lots of people are probably waiting until the weekend
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.
Keep in mind that the game has been in Early Access for over three years. Anybody who played the game in that span but hasn’t launched it since yesterday is going to push that percentage down.
At what point does it becomes cheaper to ship it to the buyer on a thumb drive?
There’s no reason this game should be this large, it’s ridiculous.
Is the game worth it
I did my part!
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.
Using torrents would be relevant
Mineis still downloading at about 600kb per second so it will be a while. I got pathfinder kingmaker super cheap so playing that for a bit.
Why couldn’t it be preloaded?
Socially acceptable T&A, same reason everybody was into The Witcher
Is this the highest it’s ever been? Pretty nuts.
sadly, there are already better games than BG3. im not super keen on BG3 at all.
I will buy it later this year when I upgrade my PC.
And I helped!!!
feedum_sneedson@lemmy.world 2 years ago
that’s a lot of tablepoons
morgan_423@lemmy.world 2 years ago
It’s hard to get steam into tablespoons. I was really impressed.
SkyerixBOI@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Damn, The double whammy of jokes here got me good
PMmesexypajamas@lemmy.world 2 years ago
That’s only like 9 Cups of Bandwidth
CoolBeance@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Damn that’s just over 1 and a half pints
swirle13@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Take your upvote and get out of here