Baldur’s Gate 3 Early Access Races and Classes Revealed

With Baldur’s Gate 3 releasing in Early Access in less than a week, Larian Studios has unveiled the races and classes you can expect to see when creating your first character.

The Early Access release is expected to contain around 25 hours of content, designed with multiple playthroughs in mind. In fact, there are races so alien to the Sword Coast residents, they’ll have wholly unique interactions with NPCs.

On launch, players will be able to create humans, githyanki, elves, drow, half-elf, dwarves, halflings, and tieflings, including subraces of each race.

Baldur’s Gate 3’s character creation features “photorealistic fantasy races” all based on 3D scans of actors and models.

Larian says:

Our team spent much of pre-production carefully selecting, scanning, and moulding these scans, to become the base heads for character creation. Launched into Early Access is a total of 150 heads to pick from, across the 16 races & subraces.

Alena Dubrovina, Lead Character Artist at Larian Studios, says:

We decided to use scanned faces in our production to create characters as realistic as possible. We scanned 40 people of different ages and ethnicity. While scouting for models we focused on features that would fit one of the fantasy races, we looked for faces that either had something unique about them or were very versatile to fit different characters.

Eventually, we transformed that into approximately 150 unique heads of various races that you can see in-game now, and that number will keep growing. Some of the scanned heads kept their features, but others became a starting point for creating new faces. We also used scanned data as a learning resource because there is no better sculptor than nature.

From Day One of Early Access, you’ll have access to six classes: Cleric, Fighter, Ranger, Rogue, Warlock and Wizard. Each of these has at least two subclasses too, in case you were wondering how much more customisation there could possibly be.

Baldur’s Gate 3 Early Access releases on October 6th for PC via Steam and GOG, as well as Google Stadia.