Baldur’s Gate 3 Studio Reveals Most Popular Player Character Classes and Races

Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios has revealed a number of statistics from the game’s launch weekend, including the most popular player character class and race choices.

In a post on Steam, Larian showed off graphs for both, revealing that the most popular player character class so far is Paladin with over 200,000 players, followed by Sorcerer, Warlock, Rogue, and Bard in that order. Cleric was the least popular, as the only class with fewer than 100,000 people choosing it.

In a similar breakdown of character race choices, Halfelf was revealed as the most popular, but was only a slim margin ahead of Humans and Elves. The least popular races were Halflings and, at the very bottom, Githyanki. So if you’re playing a Githyanki Cleric, you’re a rare person indeed.

Larian also revealed that the vast, vast majority of players (93%) are choosing to play as custom characters, but of the Origin characters Gale is the most popular (closely followed by Karlach and Astarion). And of those making custom characters, 10% were in the character creator for over an hour mulling over every aspect of their avatar. And all players combined on opening weekend spent a total of 88 years in character creation. Wowzers.

One of the most fascinating stats is that a total of 368 people finished the game entirely during opening weekend. This is a surprising stat, but maybe not for the reasons you’d think. Baldur’s Gate 3 achieved a peak concurrent player count over the weekend of above 800,000 players, and total had many, many more though we don’t have an exact number. And 79% of players got at least as far as the end of the tutorial on the Nautiloid, according to Steam achivements, which is a pretty high number given how many players buy games and just don’t play them. Baldur’s Gate 3 only takes about 32 hours to beat if you mainline the story, so given the huge amount of players, it’s rather surprising that statistically, more didn’t sprint to the end as fast as possible. That’s possibly a testament to how endlessly distracting Baldur’s Gate 3 can be!

Finally, a few other fun stats include Scratch the dog being pet over 750,000 times (pet him more, cowards!), 65% of players making a morally “good” decision in Act 1’s major questline, and 100,000 people being rejected by Astarion (with many, many more surely to come).

If you’re still stuck in the character creator yourself, check out our guides to Races and Subraces, Classes and Subclasses, and How to Build a Character before you get started in Baldur’s Gate 3. Then take a peek at our walkthrough whenever you find yourself stuck.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].