For context, Larian Studio founder Swen Vincke predicted that the game could reach 100,000 peak concurrent users during its debut period, and that was a fairly optimistic prediction. I work in IT, and really feel for those folks. I hope they designed their infrastructure to scale!
And that’s only Steam, not including GOG, or the influx of PS5 users next month. Let’s take it to 1 million!
How would GOG know? The attraction of the platform is they hand you the game file and are done with you, no DRM, no tracking, no nothing.
Well, GOG certainly has sales numbers at least. And Larian certainly knows how many people are playing the game. Just look at the stats they published last Friday.
Presumably that’s the whole point of the absolutely necessary launcher.
“–skip-launcher” is your friend. Supposedly improves in game performance as well. https://www.pcgamer.com/baldurs-gate-3-disable-launcher/
Oh believe me, it was the first thing I looked up after being greeted with the launcher. But good to spread the message, the game is great but god the spam of launchers all over gaming is awful.
Amen. Not sure if the launcher has anything to do with the stats they collect, though. Would be nice to know. But Larian is one of a very few companies I don’t mind hoovering up my data.
Does that launch it in vulkan though? Or just skip to dx11
I think that depends on what executable you are calling. The default shortcut installed with Steam is to some online steam BS. I switched to using a shortcut directly to “bg3_dx11.exe” but I assume you could do the same with “bg3.exe”, which I assume is Vulcan. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.
EDIT: Reddit says I’m right:
Here’s how to do it directly in Steam, too, if you want: https://eip.gg/bg3/guides/how-to-skip-the-launcher/
EDIT 2: @Hairyblue commented here: “Thankfully, you can use the launch command --skip-launcher to boot straight into the DX11 version of the game, or use --skip-launcher --vulkan to boot straight into Vulkan.”
In addition to this the launcher appears to be working properly now, so if you first launch it with the launcher and choose vulkan, then next launch do it with --skip-launcher, it will keep launching the vulkan version. At least it does for me on proton. That wasn’t working when the game first released, but is now.
When I tried just launching the executable directly, it didn’t recognize my save games. So that’s something to keep in mind for anyone that changes the launch options to the exe file directly.
I assume a lot of people that use gog also use gog galaxy. It’s nice to know you actually have the game files drm free, but I still prefer having the features in gog galaxy like automatic updates for example.