Over Half of ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Romances Come From One Companion
And recent reveals by Larian Studios.
After the release week of Baldur’s Gate 3, developer Larian Studios published week-one player stats. Now, three months later, the company returns with new numbers that include Mac and Playstation gamers.
Lots of the stats just further cemented what they showed. For example, again, making a custom character was the go-to choice for players. 94% of players created a custom character. From launch week (in August) to December, players went from 88 years in the custom character creator to a whopping spent 8,196 years. The most picked and least picked race and classes didn’t change—too much. Popular classes remain paladin and sorcerer, with fighter taking third place over warlock (which now sits in sixth place).
Unlike before, Larian shared the 10 most popular subclasses in BG3. The least popular classes were monk, druid, and cleric. However, now it’s monk, ranger, and cleric.
Unsurprisingly, race-wise, Half Elf, Human, and Elf dominate, but the bottom three had a major shakeup. Githyanki went from players last choice to the fourth from the end. I suspect this bump came from the popularity of Lae’zel’s actress Devora Wilde. Despite voicing a Gith, she decided to play as one, too, while livestreaming! The single-digit fraction of people who decided to play the game with an Origin character still chose Gale as number one. While the order stayed mostly the same, the previous second (Karlach) and third (Astarion) swapped places. Now, the choice to play as Astarion is neck and neck with Gale.
Enemies-to-lovers and the friends along the way
Speaking of Origin characters, many players see them more as companions for adventuring than playable characters. These are people you bicker with, confide in, hook up with, and maybe even form an in-game romance with. The relationship writing and companionship mechanics are so well done they’ve drawn many non-RPG players to this game. Even on the romance side of BookTok, most everyone over a certain age knows who Astarion is, even if they don’t know what he’s from.
Also, some players uploaded mods to play this game as a dating sim first and epic turn-based role-playing game second. Despite the Astarion fever, when it comes to finishing the game in a relationship with one character, he didn’t make the cut.
On December 5, Larian shared that of all the relationships that made it to Act 3, 51.3% of players completed the game with Shart—erg … I mean, Shadowheart. God’s favorite princess was followed by Karlach and, to my giddy surprise, Lae’zel. Between Shadowheart putting straight men and bisexuals of every gender in a headlock, it shouldn’t be surprising she was number one. Additionally, when you reach the beach at the start of Act 1, you can’t miss her. Meanwhile, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a TikTok or read a post on Reddit of people describing a location signifying they’re well into Act 2 asking for help finding “the hot vampire.”
Larian also revealed that in Halsin’s sex scene, 2/3rds of players opted to move forward with him in human form. As someone who’s experienced both, I can confirm y’all chose the best option. Also, only 9.7% of players on Steam unlocked the hidden achievement “Mind Blown.” (Do not look into that if you don’t want mid-to-early Act 3 spoilers.) I and many others await the day when we get the full breadth of stats on this-out-of-this-world scene.
Putting yourself out there in this game isn’t hard, but playing Honour mode is. Here, you only have one life and one save file. According to Larian, of the 158,000 Honour mode playthroughs, over 34,000 players have of already died. As of December 5, only 464 parties completed the game at this extremely high difficultly level. This contrasts with the 1.3 million players that completed the game so far using one of the three modes available at launch.
(via Larian Studios, featured image: Larian Studios, screencapped by Alyssa Shotwell.)
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