1y ago

When Baldur's Gate 3 came out, Steam's overall bandwidth consumption went from around 18 Tbps to 146 Tbps

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.

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183 comments

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!
  
  piqued*
  
  Thanks, I wasn't sure it was right but also too lazy to check.
  
  and too lazy to edit 😅 just joking around
  
  I'm leaving it for future generations.
  Also so your correction makes sense ;)
  
  pooped*
  
  Please, please don't take this as any insult or criticism, but for future reference, it's "piqued".
  This particular homophone is almost as devious as "milquetoast". (Sounds like "milk toast")
  Edit: someone beat me to it and now I feel like a jerk for piling on. Sorry!
  
  An easy way to remember "milquetoast" is with context, here let me use it in a sentence:
  "Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath is an Eccentric-class Offensive Unit."
  See, didn't that clear it all up?
  
  It's been about 5 or so years since I reread The Culture books. It might be time again.
  
  I'm not the person you answered to, but as english ain't my first language I figured I'd ask:
  I get that this person was trying to say "piqued" as in "got my interest"
  But wouldn't "peaked" as in "my interest couldn't possibly get higher as it has peaked from that new information" also be valid?
  (I get it's a saying, but as I'm not familiar with that saying in english it didn't bother me, which is why I'm curious)
  
  piqued implies a mild interest worthy of further investigation.
  peaked implies interest can't possibly get any higher, as though they were already super interested, but the ability to pan the camera eclipses all other interesting features.
  
  Yeah it technically would get across a similar meaning. And at this point I see “peaked” more often online than the right one. But “piqued” is the idiom— not that it matters all that much.
  
  For a long time I mixed up deprecated (meaning, no longer supported) with depreciated (meaning, having lost value over time) because they can both kinda apply to the same situations, if you tilt your head the right way.
  
  The zoom out is very limited. I constantly wish it could zoom out more
  
  The inability to zoom out is my dealbreaker for Diablo. The limitation doesn't feel immersive to me, it feels claustrophobic.
- 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 especially is close enough (being mobile) you can absolutely make out the skins. 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 beehives.
  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.

183 comments