In a post on the game’s Steam page, Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios revealed that many players don’t seem to be taking full advantage of the game’s extensive character creation options.
It seems that the team at Larian combed over the character creator analytics in order to create a new character based on the most popular selections for individual categories. This was what they ended up with when the process was finished:
“Congratulations, you’ve basically made the default Vault Dweller,” Larian notes in regards to the results of this experiment. “What the hell guys. We gave you demon eyes, horns, and even tails. We are sorely disappointed. Go crazy. We worked hard on this!”
Opinions will vary as opinions are want to do, but it’s somewhat odd/vaguely amusing that early Baldur’s Gate 3 players have seemingly chosen “Steve the Protagonist” as their hero despite the fact that the game offers players the chance to not only choose between several exotic fantasy races but a suite of special options that allow you to come up with some truly unique creations. We’ve seen many of those creations across various social media accounts, so it’s not like the potential of this game’s character creation system is hypothetical.
So why is it that so many people seem to be settling on a factory manufactured local politician when gifted such an array of options? Well, it feels impossible to rule out the likelihood that many players attempt to create a version of themselves in any game that lets them customize their characters. Given the results of this test, we’ll let you make of that what you will.
It’s also certainly possible that the results of this test are being impacted somewhat by early players’ desire to just jump into the beta and not necessarily fuss with the character creator. Anyone who wanted to just try the game out and maybe focus on a character build later may have just settled on a basic creation with the idea being that they’d eventually revisit the character creator and produce something a little more exciting.
Finally, it should probably be said that the above character is fairly representative of the leads in many popular fantasy works over the years. While there are naturally numerous exceptions to that insinuation in various genre works, even Baldur’s Gate 3‘s early trailers featured a human protagonist with features relatively similar to the creation above. Your interpretation of that data is, again, subject to opinion, but be sure to really explore the limits of the game’s character creator and test your own creative abilities.