15 percent of Baldur’s Gate 3 playtime is spent in character creation

Larian Studios has released another set of statistics for Baldur’s Gate 3 which reveal some illuminating statistics.

The accumulative playtime across all players is 452,556,984 hours, which is about 51,662 years. By contrast, 8196 of those years were spent in the character creator, accounting for 15.9 percent of all playtime.

1.3m players have finished the game’s campaign at least once since Baldur’s Gate 3 first released fully in August. If you’re curious like me, you may be wondering what percentage of players this represents. While Larian hasn’t specified sales numbers for the game, in August Larian CEO Sven Vincke told Bloomberg it had sold 2.5m copies on Steam during early access.

At 1.24m, the number of players who have turned themselves into rolling cheese wheels is almost the same as the number that have completed the game. I wonder how many people have been doing a cheese wheel only run as a challenge?

Shadowheart is the most popular romance, winning over 51.3 percent of players. She was followed by Karlach and Lae’zel, and 66 percent of players asked Halsin to bare all (“not bear all”) when pursuing his romance path. Scratch has been given 48.5m pets, hardly enough by my standards.

Baldur’s Gate 3 recently added an epilogue and a supremely difficult Honour mode with permadeath in its most recent update. 158,000 Honour playthroughs were made over the weekend, and only 464 of those were successful.

The game’s release date for Xbox Series X/S will be revealed at The Game Awards later this week, meaning Xbox fans will be able to add to these ridiculous numbers. I expect Scratch’s pet count to double at least.