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* I may have fallen into a Baldur's Gate hole for a bit, but that's not a bad thing. Just need to crawl back out. Going in as blind as I did lead to a misclick at character creation I didn't realize and well, now I am stuck with it for my first playthrough.

The devs prepared for the possibility of 100k concurrent players due to hype, but broke 700k on Steam alone... though the GoG numbers probably aren't high. In terms of the all-time record of concurrent players on Steam, they hit 9th place. There are a lot of factors, I think. Part of it is that again, despite the crush of players... I feel like I am tempting fate here but the game just works. With Elden Ring the launch was so borked most people didn't play at launch. I actually refunded the game due to bugs. Also, D&D is a beloved franchise, Baldur's gate fandom has always been huge and a long open beta where people got to see the system be built and some of the characters develop. But most people are pointing to the viral bear clip as the reason for the hype. I wouldn't actually be playing it just due to hype, it's that a stunning amount of people I know did play early access at some point and were going to be playing it now that they can see the rest of the plot... or rather plots at the ending has 17k variations and there are so many possible cut scenes it would be twice the length of Game of Throne to watch them all.

No wonder there has been drama from other game companies being all 'don't let this game set your expectations for video games!' And like... the initial tweet was a bit out of touch, but the devs from so many companies QRTing it with even stronger takes? EA shut the F up you park your IPs offshore to make 0 money on paper to avoid taxes! Fix yer bugs, pay your employees better and pay some freaking taxes on those billions. Larian Studios and they games is what happens when studios avoid being bought out and eaten by you.

And shout out to the employees of Sega for their recent successful unionization!

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* Ever have issues you hear a ton about, but just don't want to add to how much it's talked about? Then eventually you just want to soap box about it way late to the party? So, anyway these are my thoughts on the FextraLive Embed controversy... just kidding. But seriously, I just need to be a bit louder sometimes because otherwise I will turn into old man yelling at cloud.

* Usually I outrun spoilers, but that isn't going to happen with Baldur's Gate 3. I've blocked a bunch of tags on tumblr due to it giving me suggested posts. We'll see how this goes.

* So, I was wrong when I said BG3 hit 7x the amount of concurrent players as they planned for, they had already broken 8x. Again, I shouldn't be this stunned that I bought a AAA game and it actually works, just works. It really shows the sad state of the gaming industry that I am shocked the game is playable at launch, especially a RPG style game.

* Ten day forecast no longer shows a streak of 100+ days, but still a good thing to keep a weather eye on.

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* I need an explainer on Richard Siken being a SPN slasher writer being a big deal. Apparently he got an early book as a writer from the fandom because he was used a lot for fic titles? someone make a 10-20 minute video essay so I can just drink and watch rather than chase this down.

* Why is it when I play an hour of GW2 I feel like I've done several things, but when I try to do one thing in Baldur's Gate 3 it's like... oops there goes Sunday. Because it's a long game, I am using MMO rules for it in terms of how much am letting myself play.