Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Herosexual NPCs

Larians big problem (in my book) is that they try to hard to include everything for everyone at every oportunity, thus diminishing the satisfaction by achiving it.
i endorse having a broad spectrum of different sexualities in the game , but having every single npc able to take on the sexual role that fits everyone just waters everythiung out.

The same goes for many of their other decisions in the game, sometimes less is more you know.

Super true

You are aware when we say 'fantasy' for this kind of settings, we are not talking about sexuality, right? Cause your argument doesn't stand by what you want to imply. If it's a fantasy world, it doesn't mean sexuality should be diverse. It means sexuality should be what the creators of the world have chosen for it. There could be fantasy worlds in which sexuality doesn't exist at all, such as we can find in some planar worlds of D&D. Or others in which sexuality is abstract and doesn't involve touching at all.

Besides, as far as I can see it on this forum alone, many players don't care at all about sexuality in this game. And so asking for the most diverse sexual interactions doesn't even interest them in the slightest.

Gygax didn't write in any of his rule books that all the npcs, monsters, gods and trees should be bisexual. And if Larian wants to stay true to the source material, they shouldn't either. Actually, heterosexuality should be the norm.

I fully agree with you but I must point out that Larian plans to add every single PHB race to the game, so eventually the sheer amount of inclusion will overshadow the realism aspect so much that this argument kind of falls into itself;
If anything this reinforces your point, of course. The bigger picture is so divorced from reality that I find it hard to imagine people can still relate.

Can't say that I agree. For example in DAI, some of the romances were gender and race locked and I just ended up using mods just so I could experience romances with them.

I'd like to have a game where my character could be with anyone. I'm also a person that doesn't believe your sexuality defines who you are as a person. Being locked from possibilities in games isn't fun to me (such as gender-locked classes and ect). Larian seems interested in giving their players freedom which is shocking to me that a lot of players actually seem more interested in taking away. Please continue to give us freedom, Larian.

But it doesn't make it realistic or interesting. Because in real life, you cannot force a homosexual into having a heterosexual relationship. BG3 is not a sex simulator. And as such, I would prefer it to be more realistic in terms of interactions with companions than just a minecraft sex game in which you can even choose your positions in bed.

If companions are so malleable in their sexual orientations, it makes them bland and boring in my opinion. Because it doesn't tell anything about them apart from the fact they are like sex dolls, being only here to please the main character.

I'm also in the camp that wants to be able to romance/flirt with/shag (subject to an appropriate pursuit) the NPC of my choice, rather than being limited to those that the developers have chosen for me.

I don't look at the companions as all being pansexual, instead I think how lucky it is that the companion I chose to romance happens to share my sexuality (or, possibly, find me so irresistible that they act against their dominant sexuality...). I know that some of the others make 'leading' comments, but it is usually easy enough to shut such pre-flirtation conversation down.

I'd much rather have the 'problem' of shutting down overly friendly companions with whom I don't want a romantic relationship, than have the NPC with whom I feel my character would be attracted to happen to be unavailable because they are only interested in men/women/dwarfs/lizards,/whatever. It's MY game, after all, and I ought to have agency over who I can form relationships with.

Freedom is great, my point is that when you get evrything handed to you on a silverplatter it gets boring real fast, freedom and satisfaction dont exlude one another, but very few people enjoy Monty Hall games for long.

For me it's not even about realism. When the romance is so in-your-face i just don't want, say, Alistair starting to flirt out of nowhere. It's just awkward. Makes me thing of how in the DA2 you had to start a romance with Fenris to teach him how to read.

I think it comes down to the fact people nowadays want everything. They can't stand if they are buying a game, they cannot do what they please with the characters in it.

For me, this aspect of the game is exactly the same as any other rules. If the writers decide one character should be homosexual because it fits his background, I wouldn't mind if nothing can happen with him if I play a woman. These are narrative rules. And I abide by them the same way as I abide by the system rules. In my view, it's part of the game experience.

There are things that have nothing to do with our opinions or personal ideas. If I let an object to fall it will fall with due speed and acceleration based on the height some factors like resistance of air can alter the actual speed, but speed still will follow the physics rules.

Same goes for sexuality, indeed there are corollary factors that have an influence in one person's sexuality, still the core is one and only one.

Obviously there is the fact that sexuality is an spectrum with pure homosexuality and pure heterosexuality situated at the extremes, in the middle there are all the shades of bisexuality, pansexuality and even asexuality.


And sexuality plays a big role in the development of a person, because it has to do with a primal pillar of human interaction within a society, for a lot of reasons. In my case my sexuality made me cautious, more than what i think I would be, of others, made me thougher to slurs, made me question the reasons behind a lot of things I loved to do, even the fact that I maintain completely separate my personal and work lives and never openly come out (pretty sure all the people I know gest that I'm no straight, still I'm not interested in openly sharing this part of my life), all of these are things that were strictly tied to my sexuality and parts, important ones, that define the man I am.

Furthermore studies have shown how sexuality is indeed fluid but not as much as we would love, and how the dominant trait in those who are not in te extremities is not so easily shifted to the non dominant one (indeed sexuality shifts in non full bisexual or pansexual people, requires very heavy conditions, in some cases for the shift to happen the conditions have to be traumatic).


Said that, I get that is frustrating (somehow) not to have complete freedom in a game, but that is what makes interesting and engaging a game, the fact that we have to move inside a set of rules and boundaries, when I buy a game I know beforehand what is the set of rules.

At least that was it used to be, now major companies that produce rpg games are pushing through the sopiling of players by allowing them to have characters with almost absolute freedom, something that has tainted this kind of games.

I loved Dragn Age Origins also because the npc's, like in real life, had their own sexuality, you could, as a male character, create an amazing brotherly relationship with Alistaire but nothing more and so on.

Alas I know that things aren't going backwards, a big bunch of players want to be able to have romances with all the npc despite of the gender/race/class of the palyer's character thus companies are going to make npc's herosexual.

I'll adapt my playstyle making my characters to be the ones who choose if and wich companion they'll interested building a relationship (in all the shades from friendship to full bunny stuff).

Actually, to be honest, I don't understand why it should be a topic at all. And I think it's Larian's fault on the matter.

When you play D&D around a table with your friends, there is barely anything sexual. Our characters don't deal with those kinds of things because there are not the focus of the game. And somehow, Larian has decided BG3 should be more like The Witcher 3.

So I really understand the complains of some players on this forum about the fact they don't want the companions to openly flirt with them. It must feel awkward and even gross to those who only want to enjoy a D&D experience.

And there should be a way in the options to tone it down.

This happens even in real life if another person is shy you can get drunken kiss out of nowhere. ;-) In case of BG3 problem lies in getting tem all open at the same time. From choice perspective it is fine, but people might feel uncomfortable when game throw all at once. I think it should be done in a way that game tracks your flirts and approval rating and then NPC, wihom you triggered and has highest approval, gets the yellow mark. Currently I got only Astarion marked at tiefling's party and it was annoying.

I prefer the characters who can be romanced be bisexual or herosexual. There are a limited number of companions, and that way there is a greater chance that there will be a romance that fits with your pc's alignment and personality.

Wait, your Bards aren't trying to fuck everything that isn't nailed down?

You just wrote this, and I'm already furious.

Also, this is a stupid idea. You suggest making characters represent LGBT community (or represent someone like heterosexual idc), which was enough for me in Bioware games. At this moment, each of us can decide who is who. Representation will ruin everything and only infuriate people, as it did with Jaal from Mass Effect. They made him heterosexual, and as a female player, I think that was unfair to those who wanted an alien boyfriend. But then bioware changed that (cuz ppl cry), and it only made it worse, now two sides were angry. Imagine that someone changes orientation of your favorite character with a patch. And Jaal had these hints in LI quests that his family needed a "continuation of the family". People can be sensitive to this. If they had initially made it bisexual, both sides would have been happy.

Similarly, Dorian in Dragon Age had hints that his family was angry because he couldn't ‘continue the family’, and he's gay LUL. Do you understand? You're not just asking to make a character gay (or other), you're asking for representation. And this is rlyyy bad.

That's why making everyone bisexual (conditionally) is much better. Everyone has their own canon. There is no representation. Enjoy it and don't interfere with others. This is best way.

This is fantasy. No one need 'realistic '. The interest in characters is not in representing their orientation, but how the romance is made. How well the relationship between the player and tcharacter is worked out. Not gay backstories like Dorian's or straight letters about procreation from Jaal's mother. I beg of you... If they are sex dolls for you, then you only see their sexual preferences in personality. Very sorry.

It's not about the height of the stack, it's about arrangement. I, for instance, prefer many small piles laid out in a snowflake pattern.

And more on topic: the only time playersexuality becomes jarring to me is when an NPC swings one way with the rest of the world, but another way when it comes to the player, and it's never noticed or remarked on. Take Wyll - he's got a sexy female cambion for a mistress/patron, flirts hard with both Lae'zel and Shadowheart, ignores Gale and Astarion, but at the party he (apparently) propositions a male PC exactly like a female one, with no prior indication that he'd be at all interested in a guy. That just looks odd to me.

This is something both Larian and some of Larian's fans need to realize ASAP - freedom is bullshit. Even in a dnd session with a human DM there are rules and restrictions, otherwise there was no point in creating Dnd in the first place, and people would roleplay however they want.

If we zoom in to a video game setting, there is no freedom. You can romance whoever the developers say you can, and unless the game is extremely easy to mod any other option is impossible. There are a select few NPC's the designers decided would be rommanceable and either way you have limited options. Creating 8 herossxual companions is just a lazy way to give us "freedom". Since it fits the rest of Larian's design philosophy it's not surprising but super lame. Nothing wrong with aspiring to give the player as much freedom as possible within the boundaries of the game, as long as you are willing to acknowledge these boundaries and work within them, something Larian doesn't do.

To me being able to tell specific stories is the improvement I'm talking about, a story about a gay or straight person is going to have more character than a story about a gay and straight character...I mean "all of the above" sexuality. Don't misunderstand me I'm not saying a characters stories should be solely about their sexuality but that being written with one is better than being written with all of them.


Putting aside the philosophical question of when a pre-flirt becomes a flirt, I don't think that making your companions herosexual does reflect freedom of choice for the player because the choice has been made for you, they're all romanceable your interaction with them is now a formality.
I do believe people are not defined by their sexuality, but I do think their relationships are.

I also don't think having NPCs with distinct sexualities takes away from player agency, because it doesn't affect your character at all, not being able to romance someone is not something you should expect otherwise I do begin to understand the question of consent. I was also thinking about this when the topic of Alistair in DA:O came up, if a gay man wanted to romance Alistair, but had to roll a woman to do so, did that fundamentally change the relationship for you? I've heard people who are for herosexual npcs say that it doesn't, I think it probably does, though it's been a while since I played DA:O.

I think this goes back to the self-insert/exo-persona divide, If you're by a quirk of character selection no longer compatible with an NPC it doesn't bother me because a) I think that makes that NPC a more complete character and b) I'll be playing this game so much I'll be that person eventually.