It’s hard to get steam into tablespoons. I was really impressed.

That’s only like 9 Cups of Bandwidth

Take your upvote and get out of here

That’s nothing. My coworkers node_modules directory will soon require their own NAS and dedicated 10Gbps circuits.

Steam has some of the most consistent and high quality servers around. It’s quite rare to see them slow down or go down, at least in my experience.

I wonder how much they paid for that launch bandwith.

Because they use Akamai as a CDN.

Crys in low internet speed

Isn’t Steam download peer to peer additionally from their servers?

Camera isn’t stuck in isometric view. You can zoom, pan, tilt and see all the fantastic detail.

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?

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.

That was always my confusion about people buying skins in league of legends or dota. I can barely see them!

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.

While true, us asymmetric broadband customers (where my upload is 1/10th my download) are grateful this is not the case:D

it is already partially implemented for local network transfers.

Blizzard’s Downloader used torrents.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-legal-uses-for-bittorrent-youd-be-surprised/

They do have such system, but only works for clients in the same lan.

Off the top of my head, I know Windows Update and the Battle.net launcher both do this

You take a game series that has a reputation for being great (but not that many have actually played it). Then you add the D:OS fans to it. Give people four year to “pre-order”. Have the DnD movie be a success a few months before (if we don’t look at the Hollywood accounting). Then have the game release first in a 3 month chain of big game releases, right after a summer of game drought. And not be a buggy mess despite its complexity. By a developer studio who have wanted the DnD game license for a long time and very much want it to be their best.

Of course theres gonna be a lot of players then. But I don’t think it will be easy to repeat in the future.

With how popular the Divinity Original Sin series is I would be surprised if the game wasn’t as popular as it is. Larian knows how to make a fucking great crpg.

As in DVDs or Blu Rays?

Computers running for hours just downloading, servers running hot to share the files, extra bandwidth in use - certainly not free.

But in contrast to producing optical media, burning data onto it, printing a cover, sticking it in a plastic box, sticking that plastic box in a larger box with polystyrene peanuts, putting that box with other boxes on a pallet, wrapping them in shrink wrap, flying them across the world, discarding the wrap, breaking down the pallet, driving individual boxes around a region, having an employee come to the store early by car to unload boxes, and have them put individual game cases on display on metal shelves and then lighting and air-conditioning said game cases for a few weeks until they’re all sold to customers who drive to and from the store, and then run it on their local computer… Download has got to be more efficient. Certainly when most games then have an update to the disc version already required to download by the time the customer gets home.

I don’t think the difference is worth considering. The computers running for hours actually playing the game would be the same and that’s the bulk of the energy consumption. The spike from downloading it or physical distribution is probably irrelevant in the big picture.

The main argument in favor of downloading is, it’s easier to provide the necessary energy in a cleaner way. You just need electricity, and you could power everything using solar or other “clean” sources. While the production and distribution of the physical copies will have to be done by boat, car, and potentially even airplane. And I think we are still far away from electric shipping boats.

I have no info on it. I can speculate, and I’m happy to be corrected!

There is no way that physical media is greener.
Just the sheer production of physical media would be more than the servers, never mind the transportation, space in shops, people traveling to pick it up.
And then, day 1 rolls around and there would still be updates.
10x bandwidth for an hour is nothing.

And I’d consider everything up to the trunk routes of the internet. Ultimate, internet trunks and consumers are going to have internet. A data center peering to the trunks isn’t hugely power intensive, the networks are going to exist and the bandwidth is available, it’s mostly a matter of cost. So, it’s essentially steams datacenter impact.

Could probably estimate it.

If it’s able to deliver 150tbps, and we assume steam is using 100gbps networking per server (ultimately, it’s just file serving), that’s 1500 servers.
Say a server is 1.5kw, that’s 1.5kw of power and 1.5kw of heat. DC cooling is about 15%, so 1.77kw per server.
Or 2.7 MW for all 1500 servers.
Round that up to 3MW to account for backups, spares, switches etc.
So, let’s assume that the BG3 download took 3MW for 1 hour.
And, I feel, this is an over estimate.

Trucks are 300-500kw. Let’s take 300kw, best case.
A single DVD case (let’s ignore that this game is on the edge of a 4-layer bluray, and say it’s single disc) is 55 grams.
2.5m copies (the lowest sales estimate I’ve seen) would be 137,500 kilograms, or 137t.
A 44t artic truck can carry 24t of cargo (this depends on the actual truck and local regulations, of course).
So, moving 137t of discs requires 6 trucks.
6 X 300kw = 1.8 MW.
So, if it take more than 2 hours to truck these discs to get them to stores, then transportation is already over the DC power requirements.

Most of the distance covered by internet transmission is transmitted by light. It’s as efficient as it gets.

I’m looking forward to the return of games so big they merit physical distribution. Like, the first terabyte game that comes on its own SSD - plug it into a spare M2 slot or a USB3 port and go.

No more than any other release. This is just notable because it was all at once, which Steam is usually good about distributing, but this time it didn’t work out and they took the traffic all at once.

Basically you’d see the same thing spread out over days with a usual steam release and the pre-loading that goes with it.

As for a physical release, I mean, I absolutely would if I could…

You’re welcome over at patient gamers!

XCOM meets Diablo is a decent enough way of putting it, as long as you don’t expect the mechanics to be 1:1. Since you brought up positioning, there’s no grid for movement, or flanking, for example. Battles are turn-based, like XCOM, but it’s not split in player turn and AI turn, instead, each individual character/npc gets its own turn, with the order decided based on dice rolls and whatever modifiers are applicable.

It’s quite different from both in the way that the skills can have position mechanics for some like backstab (rogue class, least I am pretty sure they can backstab), or persuade/intimidate to sway conversant to your objective, but still xcom related in the way that each character has a turn where they can do a variety of multiple things in a turn. Diablo is only similar in that it has skills but an extremely different paced game. Positioning is important for spells, unless I am misremembering, because AOE in DnD doesn’t care who’s in the area, so you don’t want to cast fireball when your party members are within the area.

Turn actions are broken down into their own categories like action / quick action (*later edit, bonus action when reading abilities/spells) which each has their own amount of (though usually a similar amount but after some levels some classes can hit/attack multiple times, this is needed for martial classes). The combat is turn related once started but you can often get characters into positions before starting combat (this may need stealth for some because once certain enemies see you they start combat). There is a bigger emphasis on role playing (conversation) choices in the game that can impact encounters, either with the current conversant or down the line. Certain actions like getting caught stealing will impact things too CRPGs are their own genre, have more in common with other Larian games (divinity original sin) or games like Pathfinder, and of course the older DnD games. The rules takes some knowledge and getting used to but not overly difficult, you can download a free edition of the DnD 5th editions rules which may help too(not 100% accurate but close enough). If you have friends I think you’ll enjoy playing with them as you figure out your strategies from battle to conversations but it’s a slower paced game. Just don’t ignore things that can boost out of combat abilities to persuade (skill) or stealth that can give other opportunities while playing, though you can probably just play a murder everyone party if it works for you.

If you enjoy a quicker paced game though this isn’t your game is all, it’s slow and there can be a lot of time spent checking chests, talking and wandering. If you enjoy story and some tactical combat this is a good choice in my opinion.

Edit: forgot to add, party composition (classes) makes a big difference,you probably don’t want a group of 4 of one class as each class has it’s niche, but doesn’t mean it’s undoable may just be more difficult.

Later edit: I said quick action, but it’s a actually bonus action, helpful for when reading the text, hopefully nobody was confused.

Normally pre-loading helps to even the load. For automatic updates, Steam strategically distributes them to even the load.

Steam version is still technically DRM free, just don’t have Steam running when you run the executable.

Time to buy a 256GB stick for it lol