Dragon Age creator explains Baldur's Gate 3 romance debate by confirming that RPG fandoms rarely make the same choices as everyone else

gamesradar.com:

The creator of Dragon Age has weighed in on a Baldur's Gate 3 debate about the difference between choices made by an RPG's hardcore fans and those made by the wider playerbase - suggesting that there was often a wide gulf between the decisions of each group.

Earlier this week, Larian dropped new stats confirming that Shadowheart was far and away the game's most popular romance option. The cleric was romanced in more than 50% of playthroughs, with the two other female characters - Karlach and Lae'zel - coming in somewhat distant second and third places.

In turn, that conjured plenty of comments about the relative popularity of Astarion, a character who's garnered far more attention among more hardcore fanbases. One example points out how the vampire dominates the most popular tags for submissions on fan fiction website Archive of Our Own (Ao3), but doesn't even make it onto the podium when it comes down to the cold, hard, stats.

In response to that, one Twitter user was reminded of the stats for Mass Effect 3, where despite the apparent popularity of Female Shepard in online communities, it transpired that players had chosen a female avatar on just 18% of playthroughs, with 82% choosing to play as a male character.

There wasn't a single time, either with ME or DA, where the telemetry matched up with the hardcore online fanbase. *Wildly* different results, whether we're talking PC choices, romances, or story choices. You'd think they were playing completely different games. https://t.co/JKETzidpRtDecember 7, 2023

Those stats drew the attention of David Gaider, who helped create Dragon Age and was also a writer on Mass Effect (as well as BioWare's own Baldur's Gate games). He said that "there wasn't a single time, either