Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Latest News Community Update #7 - Romance & Companionship

New community update is about! Love is in the air!

Go read it now!

Wow...those storyboards are...very explicit. If those scenes are going in the game then an M rating is definitely not enough...

My thoughts exactly. Those noodles were nasty… joking of course, but still. This is turning out to be a very adult game.

Frankly, I was hoping for more of a fading into the shadows and waking up together the next morning kind of romance, you know 90s movies style but instead we get the whole Bioware treatment with the cringy 3D animations and all.

Of course, I don’t want to be shitty about this. I can’t wait to play this game and I won’t pretend that I will never try out the in-game romances. Still, I really loved the Divinity Original Sin 2 style narrated story episodes for the romances, little silly bit still charming, though I do understand while in this game that is a no go (completely different atmosphere and level of immersion).

Why though? It looks like more time was spent on making sure anyone can fuck anyone than was spent on actual writing or character development.

I know now what kinds of gamers work at Larian. The kinds who care more about fucking goblins for the lols than about the adventure itself.

I hate playing D&D with people like that, and I can guarantee I will hate this game now.

This isn't D&D. This is pre teen masturbatory soap opera trash.

This kind of cringe garbage makes me REALLY not want this game now. It keeps looking worse and worse with every update.

I just don't get it. At least D:OS2 kept it classy with the narration. I at least hope it's not as easy to accidentally stumble into it like it was divinity.

Definitely sounds bitter.

I'm curious how you've determined how much time was spent on "actual writing or character development"

Of course since you've determined you don't want the game, hanging around this forum would indicate what about you?

Hey hey now, let's at least be friendly if romancing eachother isn't on the table 🙈

I suppose it's fair to remind that all of these updates are just targeted focus news on particular subjects, it doesn't mean either one of them has gotten more resources or attention at the expense of something else. Sometimes, we can have both the cake and the icing - Perhaps having enjoyable character development and writing, and in depth cinematics of its events playing out is possible. This is what any of us likely would hope to see be the case in the end, anyway.

I for one am not ready to jump to any conclusions until October 6th.

38 years of gaming and a degree in critical literary theory give me enough experience to know exactly the kind of colour-by-numbers romance that has been shoe horned in to this game.

Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire did the same thing and got the same reaction from me. It was more difficult to AVOID sleeping with everything that moved than anything else.

It is bad, cheap writing and lowers the quality of this game to a Danielle Steele novella.

It's on the game to prove my experiential expectations wrong, not the other way around.

So im rather new to the concept of gaming forums but is this a place to ask the developers questions? Or do they just look at the forums and fellow fans can answer questions if they deem fit to? Anyways I know some people are fond of this stuff but will there be a way to disable nudity or skip the more spicy cutscenes. I personally find them rather gross.

Well, by default it does actually mean that other areas of the game got fewer resources since resources have been taken up to create detailed sex scenes...because they would have had more resources if Larian decided not to create explicit sex scenes. I'll never understand why a D&D video game feels the need to spend so much time and money on mature, adult content like this when it adds nothing to the game. Alluding to it, as other games have done, is all that is needed; if you want to see the explicit content you might as well just go lookup up internet porn...at least its free. This is the first time i've actually seen Larian make a decision about a game that has me seriously considering supporting Larian anymore.

it's generally a place for the community to discuss the game, and provide feedback in a way that the developers can easily access it. so asking a question like this probably won't get a direct dev response, but it's good to ask anyway because it helps Larian see what people think about these things and determine how to proceed with the information.

Okay, I started the negativity, so sorry for that...

I think the decision has to do more with the shift in tone Larian wants to emphasize with this title that BG3 is an adult game without the silliness of which a lot of people accused their Divinity franchise.

To be frank, I was expecting something like that to be in the game, with the whole campsite stuff and all, so I am not that surprised they chose to do the romance cinematics.

It still can be a great game with great character writing even if they included somewhat explicit cinematics. I mean Dragon Age: Origins is one of my all-time favourite titles and it had both cringy sex scenes and great companions and stories connected to their personal journeys.

On the brighter side, I am really curious about the whole in party conflict how it will play out between the companions.

I am also interested what happens to the companions whom you leave behind at the end of the Act 1, do they die, like in Divinity 2, or they turn into mindflayers or something… I can’t wait to find out.

The update is not only about romance, there are a lot of interesting relationship dynamics there.

I just wish that it is not exclusively during Camp time.

Other thing is that Gale and Shadow Heart don't look too evil for me as far as we have seen.

I'm still optimistic and I like the direction they are going. I (*cough*, *hack*) remember when Bioware first announced that they were going to include romances and I thought worst idea, ever. this is going to be trolling gold , this will sink the game And I was wrong. Turned out to be my favorite part of the game and -- as you can see from the many, many BG2 romance mods that's also true for many BG2 fans.

Now I do hope you can still have an intimate friendship path with NPCs that you don't want to bang. My favorite 'romance' ever was Durance from PoE1 -- we never made the beast with two backs but he confided in me and my decisions determined his fate.

Yeah, I'm hoping for redemption / corruption paths with each character. Shadowheart is having a crisis of faith, we are starting a temple of Selune and I'm wondering if she can be turned to the light.

personally im also more of a fade to black fan.
video game sex scenes ae almost guaranteed to be cringe.

Still, i like the commitment to make characters that arent Lawfull Good Human Fighters feel like they belong intot he story.

Somehow alot of CRPGs, the majority id argue, are terrible at this.
Not just for gnomes but also for more obvious fantasy types like dwarves.
Theres a lot of games featuring grumpy dwarves, but very few games that represent the protagonist beeing one very well.

Much more so for truly out there characters

also

>beeing mad about romance
why.
half the reason why people seem to remember baldurs gate is because they wanted to bone the hot evil elf...

I have never seen a video game sex scene that didn’t make me cringe in embarrassment. If explicit sex scenes are a mandatory part of romance subplots then I’ll probably forgo them entirely.

At least somebody out there is going to get to see their wild half-orc on halfling fetish depicted in a AAA game for the first time.

Larian, if you could have a PG toggle feature where during the sex scenes the narrator just describes the intimacy DOS2 style while characters just stand in front of the camera looking incredulous and embarrassed I’ll love you forever. I’ll buy two copies of the game.

Nope, not mad about romance. I'm upset with sexually explicit content.

I doubt we're going to be seeing any 'peepees' and 'weewees', so I wouldn't call it sexually explicit. Personally, the whole romance thing, sexually charged or not, is of no significance to me whatsoever, and from my own worldview, resources could have been devoted to other more important things. But that's me. Plenty of other people probably love this stuff and find it to be a significant element to the overall appeal of the game.

Evil characters don’t have to be explicitly evil, but Swen did say that the characters in EA or all either evil or neutral.