Baldur’s Gate 3 is an epic game of choice and consequence—who lives, who dies, who tells your story, who fails every possible perception check they can. But I fear, fellow wanderers across virtual Faerûn, some of you are making the choices of cowards.
Now that Larian Studios has offered its latest—and seemingly concluding—major content patch for its smash hit Dungeons & Dragons game, the developer has released another round of analytics going over a swath of player decisions from across a whopping 51,000 years of collective playtime. It’s full of the typical fare akin to the stats it released shortly after Baldur’s Gate first hit PC this summer: preferred classes, custom player species choices, how many times people have cast fireball or got turned into a sentient cheese wheel. You know, D&D things.
But the latest stats also reveal an act of gross cowardice among players: 66% of characters that romanced the Elf Druid Halsin, star of a viral intimate scene released ahead of launch in which players could coax him to remain in his wildshaped bear form, chose to tell Halsin to... well, not bear all to them.
It’s far from a totality of Baldur’s Gate 3 players, admittedly—Halsin is not even in the top three romanced party members, and even in the top three players overwhelmingly go for the angsty Half-Elf Cleric, Shadowheart. But there’s a lot of Baldur’s Gate 3 players out there, and a majority of the ones who choose to woo a rugged, burly bear of a man are simply not letting him be a literal bear of a man along the way.
Where’s your sense of adventure, people!? Part of the fun of Dungeons & Dragons, or any tabletop experience for that manner, is wild stories and tales that can only be woven by a heady mix of worldbuilding fantasy and player creativity. Or player raunchiness, sometimes, when the mood at the table is right and things are handled delicately. One of those things is wildshaped druid sex, and clearly not enough of you are getting it. Ah well, there’s always an excuse for another playthrough to add to that 1.3 million completed runs out there, isn’t there?
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