One of Larian’s smartest marketing beats while promoting Baldur’s Gate 3 was showing the world that the game lets you biff a bear. Halsin the druid can transform into a bear (the animal, not the other kind), and if you so choose, he can maintain this form while you consummate their relationship. The ensuing scene traumatized a squirrel, got Larian (temporarily) banned on TikTok, and made headlines all over. Now that Baldur’s Gate 3 has been out for four months, the studio has released updated stats on the in-game choices players are making. Of course, we jumped right to the juicy part: How many players chose to fuck the bear?
As has become its style, today Larian shared the new data in a new infographic dump that dissects how people play Baldur’s Gate 3. Some of the findings are the same as when the team released similar stats closer to launch. Paladin is still the most popular class, Gale remains the most popular origin character, and Shadowheart is winning most people’s hearts as a romantic conquest. But this time, Larian has also given some data on how many people had sex with Halsin in bear form. It turns out only about a third of people who pursued Halsin’s sex scene had him maintain the Wild Shape.
According to Larian’s data, 66 percent of Halsin romancers ask him to stay in his typical wood elf form before they do the horizontal tango. I appreciate this, because if you’re going to have relations with someone for the first time, wouldn’t you want it to be with them as they are? Sure, if you want to try the bear on for size down the line, that’s as good a way as any to spice things up in the bedroom, but you should probably get to know each other on a baseline level early on. (Okay, yes, I did let Gale astral project us into a spirit world and have a magical foursome in a void, but do as I say, not as I do.)
Other interesting stats include some information on the game’s super-hard Honour Mode, which launched last week alongside the new epilogue in patch #5. In the past week, around 158,800 players have tried the permadeath mode, 34,000 of whom have already died on their way to Baldur’s Gate. Surprisingly enough, in that time, 464 people have already seen the game’s credits in Honour Mode. Hats off to y’all, because you will not catch me attempting a permadeath run anytime soon.