Josh Soyer commented on the unpopularity of priests among players in Baldur’s Gate 3: “It has always been so”
The least popular class Baldur’s Gate 3 is a priest, he is a cleric, he is a priest, and one of the developers of CRPG veterans claims that this is not related to how they act in the fifth edition rules "Dungeons and dragons" – Players have been evading this class for years.
A week after the release of the game, Larian Studios published a series of infographics with a detailed description of various statistical indicators of players. The most popular class turned out to be a paladin, followed by a sorcerer and a magician, and all other classes took almost equal fourth places. Except, of course, the cleric, which was in last place with an unexpectedly large margin. 3 weeks after the release, the situation has not changed.
This data was the reason for the joke of Josh Soyer, a computer -developer of computer RPG, who worked on all games – from the old D&D, such as Icewind Dale, to your favorite Fallout: New Vegas and relatively recent Pillars of Eternity. This joke quickly grew into interesting information about how players of fantasy RPG chose their classes over the years.
"In my experience, this is not associated with the features of BG3 or 5E, people usually do not make clergy/priests the main characters in fantasy RPG. They were the least played class in all fantasy RPGs that I created", – Sawyer said, adding that "my beloved/most frequently played class in TTRPG and CRPG – cleric".
You can take a chance to assume why classes like the cleric are chosen so rarely. This may be due to the fact that no one wants the character he created – the main character of the story – perceived as a class "support". Of course, do not forget that in D&D There are no support classes, and clerics, in particular, are able to be both magical steep fighters of near -combat, or by healers.
As noted by Soyer, "I think that it is very interesting to play clerics (and it was so for a long time), but players simply do not often choose them as the main characters".