Larian updates us with a disturbing amount of death stats and cake butchery.
Trailing twenty years after the release of Baldur’s Gate 2, the early access release of Baldur’s Gate 3 last week appears to have been a success.
It appears we broke steam. Thank you!
— Larian Studios (@larianstudios) October 6, 2020
The new game has the badge of honor of reportedly breaking Steam on launch, forcing players onto GOG and Larian’s optional launcher which itself struggled with the traffic. The physical Larian Studios itself apparently suffered both a flood and one blackout, which Larian called “not unusual” for a launch. The estimate numbers seem to back up the carnage of the release day. Steamspy’s rough estimates predict between 1-2 million owners on Steam alone and GameDataCrunch suggests it’s in the top 0.1% for copies sold in the last 24 hours. The game’s also hitting strong concurrent players peaks of 37,201 and an all-time peak of 73,980 according to SteamDB.
Creative director Swen Vincke took to Twitter with a sentiment split between panic and excitement, saying: “Our sales are insane – this is just Early Access you all. We just wanted to have a nice little community to iterate with. Now what are we going to do?”
With all those players comes a lot of anonymous data being collected under the hood and Larian have come out with some insane findings. Least of all its death heatmaps, which will no doubt help them balance the scolding difficulty somewhat. Larian affectionately calls these MAPS OF DEATH.
Apparently, Gale, a “smug wizard” who appears out of a rock has been killed 333,757 times despite not being an official combat encounter. My personal, much less official estimates are that 10,000 of those players immediately afterwards said “not so smug now,” and another 5000 said “get back in the ground.”
Another apparent ‘death highlight’ is that “4,000 people died as a result of interrupting the intimate moments of Ogres and Bugbears.” I don’t know what kind of intimacy we’re talking here, Larian?!
Notes for the game’s first big patch and more statistical insights can be found here. I’m personally on tenterhooks waiting to find out in the next Community Update who it was who stole a piece of the celebratory office gateau. Don’t leave me hanging in suspense like this, Larian
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