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Baldur’s Gate 3 is out now and it’s already broken Steam-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro
The launch of role-playing epic Baldur’s Gate 3 seems to have brought Steam’s servers to their knees, with many having trouble logging in.
Baldur’s Gate 3 – the problems with being popular (Picture: Larian Studios)
The launch of role-playing epic Baldur’s Gate 3 seems to have brought Steam’s servers to their knees, with many having trouble logging in.
Nintendo can always be relied upon to release sales figures but almost no one else in the games industry can, so it’s often hard to tell exactly how well a game is doing. But if Steam goes down the instant it launches… that’s a pretty good sign that it’s popular.
Baldur’s Gate 3 released at 4pm BST on Thursday and for the last two hours Steam has gone haywire. It’s not consistently down for everyone but outage monitoring websites show major ongoing problems that are almost certainly connected to people trying to log in and download Baldur’s Gate 3.
The issue isn’t just because the game is popular but because it didn’t allow for preloads and yet it weighs in at an incredible 122GB. So, a lot of people are going to be waiting a long time to play it, even though it’s officially out now.
Despite being in early access for over a year it’s been a very messy launch in general, with developer Larian Studios only sending review copies out on Sunday evening, which is nowhere near enough time to get a scored review done for today.
Not when the game is expected to last up to 200 hours for a single playthrough and there’s a myriad of different characters and plot twists depending on what choices you make.
Hopefully it’ll be okay in a few hours (Picture: Downdetector)
It all suddenly seems very rushed, but why exactly is not clear. Although we are concerned about performance issues and are waiting until today’s day one patch until we publish a review in progress on Friday morning.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a multiformat release but while the PC version is out now the PlayStation 5 edition won’t arrive until September 6, the same day as Xbox exclusive Starfield.
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That’s led to the creation of the Baldurfield meme, in imitation of Barbenheimer, with the issue being complicated by the fact that Larian Studios can’t get Baldur’s Gate 3 working on the less powerful Xbox Series S and have implied that no Xbox version will launch until sometime next year.
In terms of consoles, that makes Baldur’s Gate 3 a de facto timed exclusive for the PlayStation 5, although what state that version will be released in remains to be seen.
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