Baldur’s Gate 3 asks its players to make a lot of choices. Every roll, every dialogue choice, every failure, every success: the world of Faerûn is yours to shape as you see fit. Alas, one year after release, it seems like a few more of you need to learn to live a little.
To celebrate a year since the smash-hit D&D game launched last year, Larian has shared another new celebratory pass of player stats, diving deep into just how people have spent their time sinking hundreds upon hundreds of hours into the game.
It’s been a year since Baldur’s Gate 3 was released, and you know what we’ve realised?
Over a quarter of you can’t be trusted to not pick a fight with a djinni, and a surprising amount of you enjoy bear sex and tentacles.
Who’d have thought? pic.twitter.com/kU9fAH6tnZ
— Baldur’s Gate 3 (@baldursgate3) August 7, 2024
There’s a lot of fun stats here, that build on what the developer has shared before–like a comprehensive breakdown of player class and race choices for the overwhelming majority who chose to create custom characters (shout out to my Dragonborn Paladins, Tiefling Monks, and particularly my Half-Orc Bards, who apparently too rare to be included on the list). There’s silly stats, like nearly two million people getting themselves turned into cheese wheels during a visit to the Circus of the Last Days, and there’s heartbreaking ones, like the just 34 people who saw a horrifyingly bleak end to their playthroughs using Githyanki warrior Lae’zel as their player avatar. 34 people!
But who you fought as and how you saved the day aren’t the important details when it comes to Baldur’s Gate 3, and rarely have they been in the last year. No, the fandom is all about who smooched who. Larian understands how important the love lives of the Sword Coast are, and dedicated a whole section of its new stats report to romance once again–and I fear a lot of people aren’t willing to make the hard choices.
Baldur’s Gate 3 players have been doing a lot of kissing–mostly with god’s favourite princess, Half-Elf cleric Shadowheart–but again, we are here to bear witness to cowardice. Despite my heartfelt plea the last time Larian shared player stats, even less people have now wooed Elf Druid Halsin while in his wildshape Bear form, expanding the the gap from a 66/34 split to a clean 70/30. Larian twisted the knife in me a little further, with a further bedtime statistic about the 1.1 million people who chose to have a night of potentially-literally-mindblowing passion.
At the start of Baldur’s Gate 3, players are tasked with customizing a “Dream Guardian” alongside their own character, a mysterious figure who appears to you multiple times early on in the game as a would-be-savior from your doomed fate. Eventually the Guardian reveals that they themselves are a rogue Mindflayer calling himself the Emperor, working to undermine the greater plans of his own people. Over the rest of the game, you’re then asked to weigh just how much you trust the Emperor… and how close you’re willing to get to him. And if you get really close, it turns out the overwhelming majority of people are forcing him to go back to the Guardian form they created before they do the deed, rather than keeping him in his tentacled form.
How dull! You’re playing a video game where you’re a fantastical being fighting to stop a giant brain from taking over the world, people! There’s magical spells and literal gods and giant monsters. It’s Dungeons & Dragons, it’s all about telling the wildest stories of your imagination within the setting! If you’re going to take the initial step of wooing a Mindflayer in the first place, go the whole nine yards, I say.
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