Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Latest News Community Update #23: Here's To You

Hello, everyone!

During the launch weekend, you played a combined 1225 years of Baldur’s Gate 3 – almost as long as it took to make it. And 368 of you managed to finish it within that 3-day weekend. We salute you.

We’re about to enter the second weekend of launch, and thanks to you, it’s looking like it might be a big one. Last Thursday, we released Baldur’s Gate 3 in its final form (give or take a few hotfixes), and since, you’ve taken it into the top 10 all-time most concurrent players on Steam, and according to this Tweet, accounted for 28% of all player time on Steam last Sunday.

As we continue to look forward, releasing hotfixes and working toward our first serious patch, we also decided to look backwards this week. We’ve cooked up some statistics highlighting data from the opening weekend following launch and prepared a handy infographic outlining player choices, actions, deaths, and the like. Some inspiration as we head into our second weekend, if you will.

93% of you decided that your first journey through Baldur’s Gate 3 will be with a custom character, which included the Dark Urge. You spent a combined 88 years in Character Creation to craft your Tavs. Perfection!

For those of you who decided to play as one of our Origin characters, Gale was the number one choice, which is funny because he’s also the seventh highest cause of death out of any other cause of death. Speaking of death, one NPC was shoved into a chasm for every player at our peak concurrent player count – roughly 815,000.

We know you’re dying to know race and class split. The majority of you rolled half-elves, with the least popular (somewhat surprisingly) being the githyanki. Kaincha!



When it comes to classes, paladin takes the lead by some distance. Righteous! Cleric was the least popular choice, poor Shadowheart. (You can always respec Origin characters if you want!)



Though 93% of you rolled custom Tavs, of the 7% who decided to embark on one of the Origin stories, the majority chose Gale – though Karlach and Astarion are a close tie for second place. Based on how this played out with our previous game, Divinity: Original Sin 2, players will often embark upon their first playthrough with a custom character, and then, once they've gotten to know them a little better, play their second with one of the Origins as their avatar.

Interestingly, 10% of characters made in Character Creation were there for over an hour. You perfectionists.



The full infographic will be posted below and on social media, and once again only contains data from the game's opening weekend. After this weekend, we’ll see if things look any different! For example, although Astarion has already rejected 100,000 of you, we expect that number to climb. He must be exhausted.



We’d like to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for the profound joy you've given us throughout this launch. The love and support you've shown us has lifted us up and energised us to tackle the bugs that pop up as you do the unexpected. We’ve created a game where you can do almost anything with the tools and systems we give you, and with that come a lot of unexpected surprises, but as you report them, we continue to work away on fixing them with our spirits high.

Your journeys were so full that we recently had to increase the size of savegames to allow for each individual’s personal tapestry. It was a surprise as humbling as it was serious, and serves as the perfect example of the type of unpredictable situation we work quickly to remedy. And yes, all of the hotfixes and changes that come with forthcoming patches will be reflected in the PlayStation 5 version of the game and beyond.

We have a roadmap for hotfixes and patches, thanks to your thorough reporting and the stellar work of the support and development teams behind the scenes. We don’t publish our roadmaps because we need the freedom to push and pull things around when the unforeseen happens without locking ourselves in, but we want to let you know that it’s there and that we’re currently working towards Patch 1, which will feature a gigantic list of tweaks and changes. We’ll publish these once it’s finalised.

Enjoy the adventure!

Cheers to an amazing launch and game! Love all the stats!

Yes, I love silly infographics like this!

I definitely spent two hours in character creation before launch to cut down on my character creator time day of.

I think I might have been one of the players in character creation for an hour! I'm definitely not one of the ones who finished the game in three days, but I'm slowly getting there. And having a blast

Great to hear that the team have got a roadmap for hotfixes and patches, and hope we'll get more stats in the meantime. Really interesting to see the choices everyone is making!

I love stuff like this too, even thought it's a big grain of salt thing for real analysis. It's fun to look at though.

7% chose origin starts lol. That's so funny. I love how they try to frame it as "oh yea, this is totally normal! DOS2 players did the exact same thing". I wonder how many of the millions of players will actually play a full 2nd playthrough, and then how many will go with an origin companion. I admit, I'm not convinced larian's insistence on spending so much time trying to push people towards origin starts is worth it.

editing as I read through it

- 10 million hours played, that's actually way lower than I was thinking. I was assuming there was like 5 million players, so 10 million hours played seems very low.

- Paladins being the number 1 choice is also surprising to me

- the 100,000 rejected by Astarion thing, is he really the ONLY companion that rejects people? How are they counting that?

Would love a statement on launch week’s sales numbers.
Only good news about this game, I hope the people at Larian are very proud of what they’ve built (and might be so inclined to give us an encore).

"10% of players spent more than 1 hour in CC"

*raises hand with a stupid grin on his face*

Love these stats.

Love this game.

Love you, Larian.

Also love the fact this game is doing so well.

"10% of players spent more than 1 hour in CC"

*raises hand with a stupid grin on his face*

Love these stats.

Love this game.

Love you, Larian.

Also love the fact this game is doing so well.

Best game I've ever played.

And I've managed to keep Shovel alive so far!

Seriously, you folks are great. I can feel your passion and creative effort in the scenes. If people are impressed with the game, that's because you're impressive.

Just reached the approach to BG and saw this community update. Fun and exciting info. I'm loving the game so far.

My Halfling Illusionist seems to be cutting against the grain.

Think the cleric stats are from people not wanting to be 'the healer' and having a prominent cleric in Shadowheart provided for you? I know I never took her out of my roster. I was trying to get her to hang onto the artifact as long as possible.

Best game of ALL TIME! BRAVO all!!!

Oh dear... thank you Larian for providing absolute AND relative numbers at the same time


How one would interpret such a number, well I suppose it's a matter of perspective.

This is much more than what you had with DOS2 - I believe it's been said that, with DOS2, 1 million copies were sold in the first 3 months after release.
So, congratulations to the company's owners for the nice hefty ROI. If anything, Swen knows how to make money, by the looks of it.

Will it stand the test of time? That remains to be seen.

Not bad. I look forward to seeing future statistics like how many people have found Eastereggs and when, for instant:

Paintings from Rivellon are part of Digital Deluxe upgrade. So less of an Easter eggs, and more of a paid (for new players) D:OS2 branded content.

Oh, I see, thanks for the clarification. Ok, but I still have to find them in the game environment. Maybe I don't recognize them at all, I haven't played Divinity.

"Egal, was ich nicht weiß, macht mich nicht heiß."

Unless I am missing something we can calculate maybe not exact number of players, but characters created. We have an exact number of created Origins: 115177

This is 7% of created characters, as 93% were Tav/Durge.

If 115177 = 7%
1,645386 = 100%

1,6m characters (even if we assume each player created 1 character only) is much lower than I anticipated - that's a bit over a half of EA players?

I find it funny, that Gale was one of the most reasons for party tpk - way to go, robes.

I'm guilty of spending a lot of time in the CC - andI already knew, I was going to play a halfling bard, so two choices were already done. But the rest - what bodyart to choose, what face, hair etc.

I don't play cleric, because a) I like to have Shadowheart in my party and b) I'm not in any way religious and can't really rely. Otherwise, playstyle wise, cleric is great.

Hello fellow hb

We need a special Minthara patch, there were many threads with feedback in the character discussion section

Yay for halflings