After being in early access for what’s felt like a decade, Baldur’s Gate 3’s full PC release has quickly snuck up on the world – not least because it launched almost a full month ahead of schedule – and unsurprisingly it’s going absolutely gangbusters.
It’s clear that gamers have been hungry for a CRPG of this scope and scale for some time now, with early numbers on Steam reaching some astronomical highs. The game has peaked at nearly 500,000 concurrent players since launching at 1AM AEST this morning (August 4th) and at the time of writing less than 12 hours later is still going strong at around 440,000.
Over on Twitch, the game has managed to peak around the same half a million mark when it comes to viewers, and it’s been holding pretty steady obviously factoring in the ups and downs of timezones.
Mat Piscatella of industry analyst firm Circana (formerly NPD) shared that Steam was pushing through data at a scary 146.3 Tbps at points, no doubt blasting out all roughly 100GB of Baldur’s Gate 3’s installation to those hundreds of thousands of excited players.
Steam rocking 59.3 Tbps right now in NA. Folks thirsty for Baldur's Gate. pic.twitter.com/Dg4M7DfkUe
— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) August 3, 2023
Although full reviews for the game are still thin on the ground thanks to its immense, 100+ hour campaign and review access only coming along in recent days, early impressions from critics are largely very positive.
Edie at Checkpoint Gaming has said, “Although my time with the game hasn’t been enough to yet form a full critique, I can already tell that Baldur’s Gate 3 is a very impressive feather in Larian Studio’s cap. The shining star for me so far is the story, characters, lore, and voice acting, but the flawless implementation of Dungeons & Dragons 5E mechanics is coming a close second. If it can continue to impress on these fronts, even some irritating bugs won’t stop it from dominating the RPG space.”
Meanwhile, Leana at IGN writes of their time with the game so far, “On the whole, I really am loving Baldur’s Gate 3 so far. It definitely has some blemishes, from minor bugs to a combat system that I don’t exactly adore at lower levels. But I’ve been waiting 14 years for another alignment of the planets like Dragon Age: Origins, when an old-school CRPG got a big enough budget to look like a high quality animated movie – but the design hadn’t been completely steered in the wrong direction in a misguided attempt to reach a different market like the later two Dragon Ages. This is the closest anyone has ever come to recapturing that magic.”
