Baldur’s Gate 3 downloads nearly bring Steam to a stand-still, but there’s a quick fix

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Thousands of people across the globe have been waiting for Baldur’s Gate 3 for years. With more than 20 years since the last major entry to the storyline, you can imagine the sheer volume of people gagging to get onto the game upon its release.

With no preload available for the game, the release time was filled with a near countless number of people trying to download the game at once. There’s nearly 122GBs of download required, so it’s not a small game by any means, and some players have figured out they could be waiting days to get onto it. It hasn’t helped that Steam was nearly taken down moments after release due to the servers being absolutely slammed by download requests.

Baldur’s Gate 3 fans have been, tongue in cheek, begging others to stop downloading the game so their download can pick up, while others have been complaining about the unusually slow download speeds: “Is Steam burning down”, on Redditor asks the community.

However, while Steam might be burning, it’s actually not a permanent issue, as some crafty players have found a work-around that might just solve the download issues. This Reddit thread records how to change your Steam download region, which has apparently been helping some fans get much faster download speeds.

As noted in the thread, heading over to Steam>Settings>Downloads and changing your region should hopefully increase your download speeds drastically.

It seems as though the issue did not take Steam down fully, but instead interfered with download speeds for those trying to get onto Baldur’s Gate 3. It will be a few hours, if not days, before everyone’s able to get onto the game finally, and we’re looking forward to deep dive into hell that’s oncoming.

About the Author

Amaar Chowdhury

Amaar is a gaming journalist with an interest in covering the industry's corporations. Aside from that, he has a hankering interest in retro games that few people care about anymore.