Isn’t it nuts? I finished my download in like 30 minutes, and at the time I was downloading the game on both my PC and Steam Deck, my wife was streaming a World Cup game, and I was on a Zoom call for work.
Back when I was a kid I remember downloading a little freeware game called Little Fighter 2; it took over an hour and stopped my parents from using the landline. The game is 30 mb in size!
Now I’m downloading a game that’s over 4,000 times bigger in a fraction of the time!
Downloaded and set a Twitch to idle while I work. My wife convinced me to take her to see Barbie this evening so I might get a character rolled up this afternoon but won’t be able to park myself and play for a while yet.
Barbie is a fun movie. I think you will enjoy it. Better than you probably expect.
Oh, I have no hard feelings about seeing it (and not at all because “Barbie”), just unfortunate timing for the BG3 hype wagon.
I did get my character made and watched the intro cinematic though! Deep Gnome Thief, probably to do a 4/8 split with Berserker Barbarian after my first ASI.
Rogue/Monk “ninja” here 
(honestly, I was all over the place when starting…lots of choices are great but also a wall for me…but a fun one to climb)
Wow, this launch is actually bigger than I thought it would be. It’s at like 450,000 concurrent players on Steam, which is massive. It’s in the same order of magnitude as Hogwarts: Legacy which had just under double the players, but for a game as niche as a D&D based CRPG that’s pretty huge
Some of that is attributable to the fact is basically a Steam exclusive for now . Most games have their early numbers spread across consoles, Epic, GamePass and, for some publishers, their own crap-ass front end. So it’s not apples to apples.
I don’t think it’s THAT far off. Hogwarts was Steam exclusive for the PC (no Game Pass, Epic, etc) while BG3 is on GOG. Granted most people are playing it on Steam but Hogwarts had Steam as its only PC option and I have seen people saying they were going for the GOG version of BG3*
BG3 isn’t out yet for PS5 (and who knows when it’ll be on Xbox) but I don’t know how many predominately console players (A) Own a suitable gaming PC and (B) Would have bought it on console despite owning a suitable gaming PC. So what that impact is on the Steam numbers for BG3 vs Hogwarts is unknown but I don’t think it’s completely incomparable either.
*Usually because “It’s DRM-free” despite the Steam version also being DRM-free and can be launched from its executable. Regardless, the GOG version has its not-insignificant following.
I’d be very impressed if they do well on PS5 too, but I expect PC is by orders of magnitude their biggest market.
For comparison, Divinity: Original Sin 2 - a smashing success of a CRPG that gave Larian the funds to work on BG3 for years and years - had a peak player count of less than 95,000 players. Pathfinder: Kingmaker had a peak player count of 22,000 players and WotR had 45,000.
People forget just how niche this genre is. It’s amazing a big budget game like this got made.
Anyways, less than an hour left at work - then I’ll take the kid to the pool for an hour - then my wife is taking her to a play date, so it’s Baldur’s Gate time!
Just dabbled a bit. Was disappointed that a couple of the character creation options I’d picked in EA are no longer available. However, you can do a lot more than before. So while I couldn’t recreate my character exactly, I’m very happy with how he turned out.
They have changed quite a bit in the look of the game. I’m barely into the intro and some of the cut scenes are dramatically better. They are longer and have more going on; action and stunts, etc.
I like that we have origins now. Since I was planning to play an Oathbreaker Paladin, I went with The Dark Urge, since that fits in with the “trying to be a hero but is prone to violence” thing I was going for. It still lets me customize my character’s class, appearance, name, and so on, but gives a lot more story stuff. I also made a Tiefling, so he’s got demon blood as well. It feels like a really cohesive character. I think I’m really going to enjoy this!
I got to play for an hour. Tiefling Paladin. I’m so predictable. Just like you @Atamasama but without the The Dark Urge. No, I am all goodness and light and can heal because I die a lot in these games.
It’s really good. Really, really good.
I’ll admit I was a little disappointed at only having six faces (per race/gender) to pick from. And, in standard character creator fashion, half of them look derpy as hell and I doubt anyone will use them. I read that they weren’t doing full sliders for faces but thought we’d get a little more to customize in term of facial features than that even if only Mr Potato Head eye/nose/mouth options.
I am pretty sure there was more in early access. No idea what happened.
Yes, and a paltry three vulvas to choose from. That was an interesting experience…
I went with a human bard in the end. Background: Sage. My story is that this guy was a scholar at a university elsewhere in Faerun before being kidnapped by the Illithids. He’s got few combat spells and isn’t amazing at combat, preferring to stay back and plink away with a crossbow after dropping some crowd control. His skills are all based around random knowledge abilities, too - Nature, for example. All quite useless in a fight.
By level 3 I’ll decide if I’m going to keep him relatively useless in a fight with the Lore school, or if he should embrace the adventurer lifestyle and take Sword school.
Went with human paladin, custom origin. I really liked the voiced character intros but I don’t want to be locked into anything for my first playthrough. The Dark Urge looks really interesting for a second time through, though.
Played through the opening sequence stuff. The cinematic right after character creation was very very good. I’m looking forward to this.
Some mild spoilers comparing the opening hour or so from the release version to what I last played right after early access released:
You can save Shadowheart on the nautiloid! I did so, and she proceeded to shit talk Lae’Zel the whole time - so that was fun! I thought it would be a nice little puzzle figuring out what would open the panel, but the DM told me when I picked the item up “hey, this looks like it would fit in a machine!”.
Still, I guess I should remember, it IS a tutorial.
I had no issues, game downloaded in under an hour on two devices.