As of last Friday, fans had spent a collective 88 years in Baldur’s Gate 3 character creation, according to an infographic shared to Steam by developer Larian. Almost 10% of players spent over an hour designing their character, or dithering over which of the pregenerated BG3 companions to play as. To which I say – hard relate.
Like the proverbial mule that starves to death because it cannot choose between two equally delicious piles of hay, I have so far utterly failed to get into the main Baldur’s Gate 3 quest because I’m stuck dithering over which character to play the game as.
As one of the site’s Warhammer 40k specialists I already have a ruinously time-consuming hobby, and after I recently sank too many hours into Pillars of Eternity the limits of my mortal frame have become all too apparent. It’s reasonable to assume that I only have time to play through Baldur’s Gate 3 once in my life – maybe twice, if it’s available via cranial download when I’m in the cyber retirement home.
So how do I spend that playthrough? Every choice is brilliant and has big consequences on the whole playthrough. For example, playing as a class with the ability to Speak with Animals such as the Druid would open up unique dialogues with animals from the start of the game.
According to Larian’s stats, players have spoken to 2,400,000 critters, outnumbering 1,400,000 dialogues with corpses facilitated by the Speak with Dead spell. So perhaps I want to push the numbers up for the goth side instead?
I could build a high Charisma DnD Bard or Warlock 5e and steamroll every dialogue interaction. Or I could pick a character that will synergise mechanically with the NPCs I most want to get my BG3 romance on with – a squishy Wizard to complement DnD Barbarian Karlach, perhaps?
And then there are the origin characters! Larian states that only 7% of players picked one of the Origin characters (not counting the Dark Urge, who is fully customizable). I could run with the pack and choose Gale, the most popular Origin character, picked by almost 30,000 players.
But what about Astarion, so that my character has a voice like crushed velvet? Lae’zel, so that I don’t have to encounter Lae’zel as an NPC?
My colleague Mollie wrote Wargamer’s Baldur’s Gate 3 review-in-progress and most of our guides, playing a frankly starting amount of BG3. She’s restarted Baldur’s Gate 3 so many times, either to explore new questlines or simply because an update deleted her save, that she is utterly unphased about committing to a character and just pushing on. I can only aspire to that singular focus.
If you, like me, are struggling to design your character, check out our guides to the BG3 races and BG3 classes to learn what they excel at and the kind of gameplay you can expect as a result.
You might also want to look at the BG3 mods that are available – with multiple years in early access before its official launch, it’s surprisingly well supported. Oh! And don’t forget to check out these BG3 meme characters, if you want to create a gnome that looks like Kratos, or something similarly daft.