The developers from Larian Studio glanced back at the Early Access launch of their latest creation, party-based cRPG Baldur’s Gate III. The team expected that the EA will hit a comfortable number of players, allow the devs to gather some feedback and iron out and improve the game over time as it nears the full release.
Good news! That’s still the plan. But the *bigger than expected launch* broke a few things. In chronological order, it apparently broke Steam, it then broke our launcher sign ups because the servers couldn’t keep up, and then it went on to break our support pipeline with a huge influx of support tickets. We’re not complaining. These are good problems to have.
The team admits to being phenomenally grateful for everyone who has jumped into the Early Access, provided feedback and sent error reports. Behind the scenes, anonymous data is already being parsed, allowing Larian to identify areas of interest for further investigation and cross-reference against player reports and findings from QA.
The first heatmap from Baldur’s Gate 3 shows areas where players are dying, which will be presented again at the end of Larian’s early access campaign to show how the feedback process drives intelligent iteration.
Digging deeper, Larian also today announced a number of interesting statistics on the topic of death:
- There’s a huge spike in deaths around the area where you first meet Gale, suggesting some players don’t necessarily like it when a smug wizard appears out of a rock. This is traditionally a non-combat encounter, but of course in Baldur’s Gate 3, players can enter into combat with whomever they wish at almost any moment. This suggests that players are actively engaging in combat with Gale. Is it something he said?
- On the topic of Gale, he has died a total of 333,757 times.
- Gale has a party-member kill-rate four times higher than any NPC in the game.
- Shadowheart is the only companion to die more than the player character (poor Shadowheart).
- The Owlbear Cub has killed 5,717 players.
- Exactly 4,000 people died as a result of interrupting the intimate moments of Ogres and Bugbears.
- If you died at the crash site in your encounter with the fallen Mind Flayer, don’t fret; you share company with 3,753 others.
