Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Why no pre-install?

Are they just trying to get a headline like "Downloads of Baldur's Gate 3 Crash Steam's Servers" or something? Not allowing preinstalling of a 150gb game seems really bizarre. Lots of people won't even finish downloading it for hours, especially since it drops everywhere at the exact same time

Steam doesn't allow pre-loads on games already in early access.

I feel like that could be easily overcome by releasing a new game rather than updating EA, and giving anyone with the EA prior to the release date a free download.

For small values of "easy" sure.

Does GOG allow them or there can't be preload on GOG because it can't be on Steam?

It sounds like it corrupts the game files of anyone who happens to be playing the EA when 1.0 drops.

It could be done, but Steam would likely charge a significant additional fee for administrating the second version of the game, storing it, distributing it, supporting it etc etc for what is realistically zero benefit to Larian as a business. You could argue Larian might outlay that finance for the customer experience, but honestly if they did no-one would be patting them on the back for it as hard as they are dumping on them for not. I suspect they already financed Steam to get staff in to work early on the 3rd to support an 8am launch over the original 10am, and that has gone virtually unacknowledged as even happening anywhere.

I also believe that where Steam do not offer preload they actually require other platforms not to, so that would cover GOG too.

Larian should have just announced August 4th, then surprised us last Friday by saying we could download it a day early.

I'm pretty sure somebody would have found a way to complain about that if they did.

If that's true and I were GoG, I would be suing for anti competitive practices. Wow.

They kind of did, from a certain point of view.

I'm trying to figure out how long it will take me to download the game. My wifi internet speed (which I'll be using to download the game) is registering at between 25 to 30 Mbps.

Does anyone know what that translates to in total time? I think the game is going to be 122 gig, right?

I was trying to look it up, but I'm getting confused by bits and bytes, and I'm not sure what Mbps stands for.

https://www.omnicalculator.com/other/download-time

so 9 hours just for the download?

That's what I mean. If I choose the MB option Per Second, it says just over an hour.

But if I choose the MBits option Per Second it says more like ten hours.

I'm not sure which option to choose.

I can't see it is a technical issue as many of you suggest. No matter what Steam allow Larian could just release the full game ahead of time with a small lock and make it unlock at a certain time or requiring a tiny update to unlock. Has nothing to do with Steam. That being said, I am sure Larian has their reasons for not doing so, and to me it is not so important. I have been waiting for years, a few hours more (or a day even) doesn't make a big difference to me.

You shouldn't make what is really a matter of opinions into a technical issue, it is a bad habit and it derails the conversation.

I just tested mine and its considerably faster than yours. 237 Mbps it down loads EA in and around 40 minutes, I suspect your going to be hrs mate

Curious, do you have a modem if so can you just (I call it hardwire) not sure what the proper term is. My son does that here with his playstation. He has wifi in it, seems to work better wiring it to the modem

mb and Mbits is the same thing... what it translates to is a guess because its the server at the other end i.e, Steam, Gog etc which gives you your data and the speed of that flow could be anything from zero up

assuming servers don't crash like they have every other release then a stedy flow of 15mb will be much faster then 1-25 mb jumping all over the place, thats 150,000 mb so 10, 000 sec or 3 hours

but in the real world if you get half that speed i.e, 6 hours without a crash then you would be lucky

One says Megabits and the other says Megabytes. When I put in your speed (at 237 Megabytes) it says 8 minutes. When I put in your speed as 237 Megabits it says 1 hour and 8 minutes.

That linked site seems to be making a distinction between Megabits and Megabytes. There's a drop down menu that lets you choose one or the other (amongst other choices).

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I may be able to get a hard connection; I'll just have to move my desktop PC and find whatever cord I need. I was just hoping that the listed speed was in Megabytes instead of Megabits. It all feels so unnecessarily convoluted, although I'm sure there's plenty of logic to the naming conventions.

Crap, I just looked it up and found what I was looking for. It's Megabits, which means this is going to take me 10+ hours.

Crap.

What's the difference between megabits and megabytes? One megabyte is equal to eight megabits, but the terms are used in specific ways: Megabits per second (mbps) are generally used to describe the speed of an Internet connection, whereas megabytes (MB) usually refer to the size of a file or storage space.

Holly Hell mate, 10 hrs

I hope it turns out DL faster for you.