Baldur's Gate 3 early access players must delete the game and redownload all 120GB upon...

[Daniel Sims]

Highly anticipated: Baldur's Gate 3 is scheduled for its PC launch this week, with Larian Studios releasing all the final details. Starting August 3, players will have to initiate an enormous download. In addition, the company has disclosed new gameplay features and information about other supported platforms.

Baldur's Gate 3 is set to exit early access and will launch for Windows this Thursday at 11 am EST. Unfortunately, significant differences between the last build and the full release require that early access players delete their installations and save files before launch to prevent any conflicts.

The game will come as a 122 GB download and won't allow preloading. This means all customers, regardless of whether they have pre-ordered or enjoyed early access, must start the massive download post-launch and rebuild their characters from scratch.

On a brighter note, players intending to play Baldur's Gate 3 on other platforms at their respective launches can carry forward their PC save files. Larian Studios has confirmed cross-save support between the PC and PlayStation 5 versions. The PS5 version is slated for release on September 6. Unsurprisingly, Steam and GOG customers will receive the Mac version when it launches, though Larian has yet to confirm a date.

The company is still working on the Xbox version, but it likely won't be available until 2024. The main hurdle is optimizing the split-screen co-op mode to run on the Xbox Series S, which is required for Larian to ship on Series X.

The developer is also working to get Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck verified upon or soon after launch, having already determined the right graphics settings for good performance. Combined with cross-saves, this gives console players a way to continue their saved games on the go.

While Larian didn't provide an elaborate system requirements chart detailing specs for different resolutions like other developers often do, it has provided a few recommendations.

A GeForce RTX 3060 should achieve 60 frames per second at 1440p, but the company recommends an RTX 4080 or 4090-level GPU for 4K gameplay. Those suggestions assume native rendering without any upscaling solutions. The game currently supports DLSS 2 and Larian plans to implement FSR 2.0 by early September. Both options should provide much more performance leeway.

As for gameplay, Larian revealed a new skill tree containing mind-flayer-related psychic abilities available to player characters and party members, which could significantly influence the course of the story. Moreover, players will be able to respec their entire parties, which could further impact the story.

Swen Vincke, the head of Larian, recently confirmed the company's interest in developing another Divinity title following the critically acclaimed Divinity: Original Sin 2. However, this will happen after shipping Baldur's Gate 3 and taking a creative break.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/99629-baldur-gate-3-early-access-players-must-delete.html

 

[sorten]

Kinda the deal with early access, right? Start the download, go grab dinner, and come back to play the game.

 

[J95qRP7]

It's a tough corner to be in. Be available for bug fixes and player input for two years but be unable to all preloads because you can't block players from playing a game they paid for. It must be the biggest, both in publicity and storage requirements, that has been released to date.

I'd love an overview of the cache network they have globally, through Steam and GOG, and what kind of data throughput BG3 will add to their systems. It'll have to be massive, without any preloaded data taking some strain away.

 

[Raph1]

After playing early access and seeing the work and detail they have put into this game having to wait 24 hr's extra to play the game is nothing. heck in the 'good old days' cough. you would spend a week downloading a title
unlike many other studios, Larian actually seems to give a watsit about the gamers so they have my support.

 

[Neatfeatguy]

After playing early access and seeing the work and detail they have put into this game having to wait 24 hr's extra to play the game is nothing. heck in the 'good old days' cough. you would spend a week downloading a title
unlike many other studios, Larian actually seems to give a watsit about the gamers so they have my support.

Good old days - that's when you were standing in line getting your physical copy the day of release or at least stopping by the store to get your reserved copy and then racing home to install from disc.

Today, even with all the speed of the internet that's available to most people, many of us are pigeonholed being a datacap from our ISP. 125GB is roughly 1/9 of my total monthly datacap. With everything digital these days (aside from a handful of movies that still go to disc) it is very, very easy to hit or exceed your datacap without all these extra good games coming out. 4-5 people in a home, streaming shows/music/videos/games - hitting 40GB a day is easy. 30 days a month and you've hit your 1.2TB datacap (or surpassed whatever datacap your ISP limits you with before charging you extra money or severely throttling your speeds).

Sadly, ISPs are not keeping up with the changing world to help their customers. They want to nickel and dime every one of us as much as possible to pad their bottom line.

I miss the day of physical copies - download off a disc or 4. Any updates/patches you can find online. I find this much more appealing than having to download everything with how many ISPs still have a stranglehold on much of the US with their datacaps.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Good old days - that's when you were standing in line getting your physical copy the day of release or at least stopping by the store to get your reserved copy and then racing home to install from disc.

Today, even with all the speed of the internet that's available to most people, many of us are pigeonholed being a datacap from our ISP. 125GB is roughly 1/9 of my total monthly datacap. With everything digital these days (aside from a handful of movies that still go to disc) it is very, very easy to hit or exceed your datacap without all these extra good games coming out. 4-5 people in a home, streaming shows/music/videos/games - hitting 40GB a day is easy. 30 days a month and you've hit your 1.2TB datacap (or surpassed whatever datacap your ISP limits you with before charging you extra money or severely throttling your speeds).

Sadly, ISPs are not keeping up with the changing world to help their customers. They want to nickel and dime every one of us as much as possible to pad their bottom line.

I miss the day of physical copies - download off a disc or 4. Any updates/patches you can find online. I find this much more appealing than having to download everything with how many ISPs still have a stranglehold on much of the US with their datacaps.

I do miss disks, and the security of always having your software. Being able to simply install and play without the internet is such a bizarre experience today. I miss when everything you needed was included, and you got those cool install screens/videos.

OTOH, what I dont miss is having to store and maintain that software library, and all the CD codes, nor the insanely slow data transfer speeds. With the size of games today, those DVD read speeds would be hellish. Even with blu ray, moving 150GB would take forever.

 

[Neatfeatguy]

I do miss disks, and the security of always having your software. Being able to simply install and play without the internet is such a bizarre experience today. I miss when everything you needed was included, and you got those cool install screens/videos.

OTOH, what I dont miss is having to store and maintain that software library, and all the CD codes, nor the insanely slow data transfer speeds. With the size of games today, those DVD read speeds would be hellish. Even with blu ray, moving 150GB would take forever.

It may take longer for some folk, but it would save on massive data usage.

A 25GB blu-ray for me takes around (if I'm remembering correctly, I usually walk away from the computer when I do it) 30 minutes to copy. I like physical copies because when I buy a movie I can do multiple things with it: 1) I can simply watch the movie on my computer or any blu-ray reader or 2) I can rip the movie to my Plex server and keep the movie as backup in storage should for some reason that I may need to play it on a blu-ray machine.

I always do option# 2. I buy a movie/TV show on DVD or blu-ray and rip, then transcode over to my Plex server. The movie/show is then put into storage and is readily available should there be a need for the physical copy.

I'm doing similar things with all my old physical copies of games. I've been making .iso of the discs, finding any and all necessary patches/updates for them to run without CDs or just in general on a 64bit OS. This way I have the game in two locations, on my computer and still in physical format.

125GB to be copied off discs would mean around 3 hours (give or take). My internet speed is 200mb/s, so that would be around 90 minutes (1.5 hours) or so to download 125GB game. Personally, I'd rather take the time to utilize physical copies over massive download sizes. I'd be okay with that. If one day my ISP decides to get rid of data caps, then I'd be okay with downloading large files.