After being hit with a flood and a blackout, which is not unusual for a Larian Studios Launch, fans were held back from getting their hands on the game, but after a few good shakes of a fist and an incredible skill check, their game launched, and here’s the first look at Early Access insights.
If you are a fan of Larian Studios titles, then you know what is coming, our first behind-the-scenes insights about their recently released Early Access title, Baldur’s Gate 3, the first one since the release of Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn in 2000.
Now, here we are, getting the first behind-the-scenes look at the game itself. The information comes from Larian Studios watching gameplay trends and reports from their fans via feedback. The biggest deal? Areas of interest and areas that need further investigation as well as cross-referenced through player reports and findings from their QA team.
The first bit they’ve decided to show off is the heatmap (above). The heatmap itself reveals a lot about where players are dying, which is oddly enough, where you first meet Gale. It comes out that not all players exactly like it when a smug little wizard appears out of a rock.
The encounter itself is traditionally a non-combat encounter, but of course in Baldur’s Gate 3, that’s not the case. You can enter combat with whomever and whenever you please if you would like to do so. Because of this, Gale has died a total of 333,757 times, since the launch of the game, which has an insanely high party-member kill-rate at four times higher than any other NPC in the game.
Our guess? His snarkyness got him a couple of knives, arrows, fireballs, or even clubs to the face, right? Well, we’re going with fireballs, because who doesn’t like sending someone out in a blaze of glory? Well, we do. Shadowheart is right there behind him as well. They’ve died more than the player character also.
There’s also the Owlbear Cub, which has killed 5,717 players, which also means that 4,000 people have died as a result of interrupting those peaceful moments of Ogres and Bugbears as well with 3,753 others having fallen to the fallen Mind Flayer as well.
“Behind the scenes is a feedback process consisting of parsing anonymous data, correlating that data with reviews, feedback, and bug reports, and using the output to make intelligent decisions about what to improve, where to improve, and how to iterate.
The results of which so far have been three hotfixes and the game’s first patch, which released today,” reveals Larian Studios.For what it’s worth, some of these root causes of death are getting patched in the first big patch titled “Launch,” which will help with streamlining some of the gameplay experience.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is currently in early access on PC and Mac via Steam and GOG.com, as well as Google Stadia. Cross-save functionality is expected to launch at a later date.
About the Writer(s):
Dustin is our native video game reviewer who has an appetite for anything that crosses the borders from across the big pond. His interest in JRPG’s, Anime, Handheld Gaming, and Pizza is insatiable. You can find him over on Twitter or Facebook today.