Baldur’s Gate 3 players have spent more time playing than human civilisation has existed

And nearly more time making characters than the wheel has been around (ha, ha)

Baldur's Gate 3 is pretty popular, it turns out. So popular that more collective human time has been spent chatting up hot vampires, shagging bears and being turned into sentient cheese than human civilisation has existed for.

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Baldur’s Gate 3 makers Larian dropped a bag of holding’s worth of stats in the wake of the Dungeons & Dragons CRPG’s latest - and biggest - patch arriving last week, just after the game marked its four-month anniversary on PC.

Among the fairly staggering highlights is the news that players have racked up over 452.5 million hours - or 51,662 years - worth of playtime together. By my maths (and some help from the University of Southampton), that would take us back to around the time that Homo sapiens - in other words, modern humans - started to settle around western Europe, the earliest use of string (and a needle) and the invention of fire-lighting using flint.

It’s also a good few millennia before dogs were domesticated (23,000 BC) and human civilisation as a whole began to emerge from the prehistoric era around 10,000 BC. In other words, a while.

Of that massive number, 8,196 years alone have been spent just in Baldur’s Gate 3’s character creator - with pretty much everyone (94% of players, to be precise) making a custom character. Jumping back eight millennia puts us before the Bronze Age, around the literal invention of the wheel, the first board game and the adoption of writing, FYI.

Paladins lead the way when it comes to picking a character class, followed by sorcerers and fighters. Elves head up favourite species, backed by the reliable-if-dull human, half-elf and tiefling in fourth.

While most players seem to have preferred making their own character, those who went with Larian’s pre-made ‘origin’ characters favoured Gale, with the internet’s favourite bloodsucker Astarion second.

If you preferred to romance those characters, there’s a good chance you ended up with top romance pick Shadowheart, who had over half of players reach the final act of her arc. After the cleric, Karlach and Lae’zel took players’ hearts.

Disappointingly, only a third of players apparently take Halsin up on the offer of shagging an actual, literal bear, whereas 66% asked the shapeshifting druid to ditch the furry form.

That enormous shared playtime has resulted in 1.3 million people finishing the game, which looks impressive - and is - but is almost matched by the unexpected number of players turned into a wheel of sentient cheese at 1.24 million.

Far fewer players have finished Baldur’s Gate 3’s new hardcore Honour mode, with just 464 parties making it through the extremely challenging difficulty since it was added just shy of a week ago. Over 34,000 players have died trying in more than 158,000 playthroughs, though.