Because they use Akamai as a CDN.

I wonder how much they paid for that launch bandwith.

Crys in low internet speed

Isn’t Steam download peer to peer additionally from their servers?

While true, us asymmetric broadband customers (where my upload is 1/10th my download) are grateful this is not the case:D

Blizzard’s Downloader used torrents.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-legal-uses-for-bittorrent-youd-be-surprised/

Thank you and please not. I value my upload for myself. At best make it an opt-in!

They do have such system, but only works for clients in the same lan.

I have a friend who worked at a rural ISP serving communities with only a couple hundred residents each. He told me they have a 10Gbit backbone with failover and some customers on gigabit connections, but most are served over DSL/Cable. So 10Gbit x2 over-provisioned maybe 10-20x? I just found those hard numbers for how an ISP is setup very interesting

XCOM meets Diablo is a decent enough way of putting it, as long as you don’t expect the mechanics to be 1:1. Since you brought up positioning, there’s no grid for movement, or flanking, for example. Battles are turn-based, like XCOM, but it’s not split in player turn and AI turn, instead, each individual character/npc gets its own turn, with the order decided based on dice rolls and whatever modifiers are applicable.

It’s quite different from both in the way that the skills can have position mechanics for some like backstab (rogue class, least I am pretty sure they can backstab), or persuade/intimidate to sway conversant to your objective, but still xcom related in the way that each character has a turn where they can do a variety of multiple things in a turn. Diablo is only similar in that it has skills but an extremely different paced game. Positioning is important for spells, unless I am misremembering, because AOE in DnD doesn’t care who’s in the area, so you don’t want to cast fireball when your party members are within the area.

Turn actions are broken down into their own categories like action / quick action (*later edit, bonus action when reading abilities/spells) which each has their own amount of (though usually a similar amount but after some levels some classes can hit/attack multiple times, this is needed for martial classes). The combat is turn related once started but you can often get characters into positions before starting combat (this may need stealth for some because once certain enemies see you they start combat). There is a bigger emphasis on role playing (conversation) choices in the game that can impact encounters, either with the current conversant or down the line. Certain actions like getting caught stealing will impact things too CRPGs are their own genre, have more in common with other Larian games (divinity original sin) or games like Pathfinder, and of course the older DnD games. The rules takes some knowledge and getting used to but not overly difficult, you can download a free edition of the DnD 5th editions rules which may help too(not 100% accurate but close enough). If you have friends I think you’ll enjoy playing with them as you figure out your strategies from battle to conversations but it’s a slower paced game. Just don’t ignore things that can boost out of combat abilities to persuade (skill) or stealth that can give other opportunities while playing, though you can probably just play a murder everyone party if it works for you.

If you enjoy a quicker paced game though this isn’t your game is all, it’s slow and there can be a lot of time spent checking chests, talking and wandering. If you enjoy story and some tactical combat this is a good choice in my opinion.

Edit: forgot to add, party composition (classes) makes a big difference,you probably don’t want a group of 4 of one class as each class has it’s niche, but doesn’t mean it’s undoable may just be more difficult.

Later edit: I said quick action, but it’s a actually bonus action, helpful for when reading the text, hopefully nobody was confused.

As in DVDs or Blu Rays?

Computers running for hours just downloading, servers running hot to share the files, extra bandwidth in use - certainly not free.

But in contrast to producing optical media, burning data onto it, printing a cover, sticking it in a plastic box, sticking that plastic box in a larger box with polystyrene peanuts, putting that box with other boxes on a pallet, wrapping them in shrink wrap, flying them across the world, discarding the wrap, breaking down the pallet, driving individual boxes around a region, having an employee come to the store early by car to unload boxes, and have them put individual game cases on display on metal shelves and then lighting and air-conditioning said game cases for a few weeks until they’re all sold to customers who drive to and from the store, and then run it on their local computer… Download has got to be more efficient. Certainly when most games then have an update to the disc version already required to download by the time the customer gets home.