For context, Larian Studio founder Swen Vincke predicted that the game could reach 100,000 peak concurrent users during its debut period, and that was a fairly optimistic prediction. I work in IT, and really feel for those folks. I hope they designed their infrastructure to scale!
And that’s only Steam, not including GOG, or the influx of PS5 users next month. Let’s take it to 1 million!
I don’t question the quality of the game, I just don’t feel that just doing Baldur’s Gate again, twenty years later, really warrants ALL of the hype. Like the games from that time people still talk about, like Planescape Torment, Arcanum, even something like Fallout 2 or somewhat later Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines are games that are just a bit more “out there”. Baldur’s Gate feels comparably more vanilla compared to those. It’s full of tropes and it does them well, but as far as I’ve played it doesn’t always manage to rise above them and even from a design standpoint it is not that much different from original Baldurs Gate games.
I guess this is more of a lament about the state of the industry right now, but the fact that twenty years of gaming evolution leads to just doing the same types of games again but doesn’t really fill me with that much excitement.
Those are completely different genres of games, though, and certainly not what I or anyone else I know that was hyped for BG3 wanted. We wanted a modern DnD game, Larian wanted to make a modern DnD game. We got a modern DnD game.
DnD is massively popular nowadays, more so than ever. It’s okay that it’s not what YOU wanted, but it’s not saying anything about the “state of the industry”.