The people excited to play Baldur’s Gate 3 at launch might have to wait a little longer, depending on their Internet speed, as Larian Studios has confirmed there won’t be a pre-load for the game. This is bad news for those on slow Internet speeds, as the game is over 100GB, not counting any day-one updates it may receive.
Baldur’s Gate 3 entered Early Access in 2020, and since then, it has received several massive content updates. These patches have added classes, races, and an entire level’s worth of new content, to say nothing of the areas and quests implemented. The content updates have caused the file size to balloon, with the Early Access version alone requiring over 80GB of hard drive space.
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Baldur’s Gate 3 Won’t Have A Pre-Load (Thanks To Steam)
The official Steam page for Baldur’s Gate 3 has said that the game requires 150GB of free space, so fans have been hoping for a pre-load in order to give them extra time to download such a massive game and be ready to play it on day one. However, this will not be the case as the official Baldur’s Gate 3 Twitter page has confirmed that there won’t be a pre-load.
According to Larian, this results from a Steam issue, where it cannot pre-load games in Early Access. One solution would be to take Baldur’s Gate 3 out of Early Access, but that would break it for people still playing that version of the game, which many are, to soothe their need for the launch version.
It has been confirmed that Baldur’s Gate 3 will take up 122GB of space at launch, which can be a tall ask for people on slow Internet. If you rely solely on Wi-Fi and your download speed is slow, then 122GB could take a day, maybe even two, which is agony for people who have been waiting three years to play the game.
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The lack of a pre-load is disappointing, and fans have expressed sadness about the situation on social media. The people who have supported the game since day one might have to wait a few more days to get in, but at least we can all blame Valve and not Larian. The rush to get Baldur’s Gate 3 out a month early on PC has led to some unfortunate decisions, but this Steam issue likely would have been the same, even if it had hit its original release date.
