Dragon Age Demographics

So, reading these statistics I had one additional observation. The section 2.4 lists which race the players prefer to use for their PC with 44.3 % preferring elf, 36 % human, 11.1 % having no preference, and the remaining 8.6 % being divided between dwarfs and qunari.

In section 4.1.1 the race of the players' canon Warden is
51.8 % human
40.5 % elf
7.7 % dwarf

And in section 4.1.2 the race of the players' canon Inky is
50.3 % elf
36.9 % human
9.7 % qunari
3.1 % dwarf

Based on above it seems obvious that with good roleplaying options you can significantly raise the number of players willing to play a race other than their number one favourite. So, in DAO the way the Cousland and Amell storylines were crafted and RP options they presented resulted in 15 percentage point increase in people willing to have a human as their canon Warden. In DAI the new lore additions etc. led to 6 percentage point increase in elves as preferred canon Inquisitor.

I'd be interested in seeing how many new fans of dwarfs and qunari would there to be found, if a DA game were to craft more dwarf- and qunari-specific roleplaying options, questlines and lore dumps for the maingame. If we assume right now 4.3 % of DA players adore dwarf PCs (the survey didn't include an exact figure), with a good enough storyline, I'd imagine it might be possible to have 1 in 10 players choose a dwarven character as their canon hero in future.

For me personally, I started Origins as a city elf, romanced Alistair with no spoilers, didn’t have my speech high enough and was dumped after the landsmeet. I was devastated. Shut my game off and didn’t touch it for two weeks. When I went back in I deleted that save and chose human noble. Have never picked a different race in that game since.

Inquisition rolls around and I pick human again because I loved my human rogue in 2. Got to the kiss with Cullen but realized I just wanted to talk to Solas. Dat voice. *chefs kiss* Restarted as an elf and haven’t played a human since.

I’ve never been fond of elves in any game or media but Inquisition did, at least for me, make them interesting. Mostly because of the romance and not just because of who he is. The topic stayed at the forefront quite a bit. Wasn’t relegated to a city hub and a quest. So that helped a lot.

Did those same people pick elves in Inquisition because Solas’ romance is locked to that race or just for lore reasons, since he is one of the top romances?

Thank you.


And yet there are people in this thread acting as if this survey means something, when it's only representative of a self-selected set of players.

On that basis, I would suggest that romances at least partially influence the canon choices of Dragon Age players. Female elves are likely more popular in DAI because they have four romance options. Human females are likely more popular in DAO because they’re the only ones who can marry King Alistair.

If dwarves were the only race who could sex up Varric in DA4, would their representation increase? Methinks it would.

It's suggestive of the demographics and preferences of the part of the Dragon Age fandom that posts on Reddit. It's certainly not representative of the Dragon Age playerbase as a whole, but if statistics from other RPGs are any indication the average DA player doesn't even finish the games, and perhaps as much as a quarter don't even get past the prologue. That's what makes this survey in particular interesting in contrast with Bioware's telemetry.

I love stuff like this. Good find.


I wonder if they plan on future surveys, maybe do a comparison on Twitter/Facebook groups or even someplace here. 

Doubt we will get full statistical analysis since that is impossible due to outreach, but would be interesting to see the differences betweent he social media groups, if there are any. 

I can't agree with this whole "the option to play as a woman is rare", because in reality that is rather standard. If it is a RPG game, the option will definitely be there. Even among non-rpg games where you can't choose what the playable character is gonna be, you still can find plenty that have a female protagonist.

This is just a myth that gets parroted a lot.

On another note, it is good to know that both sexes tend to prefer playing a character who matches them. So nobody needs to feel guilty about this.

I’m curious what the numbers are on that.

I’ve noticed that people often (unintentionally) overestimate the %s of minorities in a given group, because people notice minorities more than the “default”.

I’ve been on software teams where people will say “oh, that other team is doing good, they’re almost 50/50 women!” when there are literally 2 women and 10 guys. Because people are used to seeing guys in software, they all kind of blend together. Meanwhile, they’re mentally double-counting the women because they’re a more unusual sight. I’ve also seen people make the same kind of error with racial minorities — thinking there’s absolutely massive representation of X or Y group on the team when the actual % is below the general population.

So without concrete data, I’m skeptical of estimations, even if they sound reasonable. Human brains have a tendency to really fuck this up — mine included.

I was about to say, Female PCs within a heavy narrative RPG with branching choices is rare, but then most of the games that allow that go out of their way to include both genders as an option. But as a rack on, such truly branching narratives are rare in the first place.

But I still feel it's incongruous to say that they are equally represented across all genres but two. Books don't even meet that criteria.

It seems weird that someone somewhere hasn't actually done the work on what is a simple factual question.

Thanks for the link! I’m surprised it was 5:1 men:women in fixed-protagonist games, I was honestly expecting the ratio to be a bit closer when narrowed to 2019 only.

I imagine with most new Role-Playing IP's, that offer multiple race options, people tend to want to default to humans. They don't have an established lore to go off of, so playing as a human is likely the "safe" choice for a lot of people. I think the large similarities between humans and elves also goes a long way in how high the numbers are for elven players.