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.
And it still gave me 800Mbps consistently right at launch time. Good servers.
Because they use Akamai as a CDN.
Isn’t Steam download peer to peer additionally from their servers?
Only on the local network.
Oh, interesting. I didn’t know that. Is this automatic, or does it need to be configured somehow?
automatic for me. as long as u have 2 pc’s with steam open on the same network, it’ll do a local transfer
I wonder how much they paid for that launch bandwith.
Steam has a 30% cut, so, that pays
Crys in low internet speed
Precisely why data caps for fixed-line broadband was an extremely ridiculous idea to begin with.
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.
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.
Blizzard’s Downloader used torrents.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-legal-uses-for-bittorrent-youd-be-surprised/
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?
I absolutely contributed to that and bought it day one.
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.
Didn’t know this stat was public. Cool
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.
Why couldn’t it be preloaded?
Is this the highest it’s ever been? Pretty nuts.
Isn’t this basically the same with every bigger release?
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.
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.
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 (*later edit, bonus action when reading abilities/spells) 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.
Edit: forgot to add, party composition (classes) makes a big difference,you probably don’t want a group of 4 of one class as each class has it’s niche, but doesn’t mean it’s undoable may just be more difficult.
Later edit: I said quick action, but it’s a actually bonus action, helpful for when reading the text, hopefully nobody was confused.
I will buy it later this year when I upgrade my PC.
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.
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.