Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Focused Feedback: Minthara's Intimacy [Heavy Spoilers][potentially NSFW screenshots and language]

First up, the primary scene.

The introduction has some dialogue options you can explore, but once you comply, your character will perch on the altar and Minthara will step in closer and put her arms about you. So far so good in terms of atmosphere and pacing...







For all but human males, the lighting ends up being very bad in the lead in dialogues – and as much as the camera does drop down to halfling height for them, the lighting hasn't been adjusted. It's worth noting here that for small-sized characters, the dialogue that leads towards your option to counter-dom her has Minthara reach out and brush your cheek. This makes sense on human-sized characters, but there is no indication that she has bent or knelt down at all for smaller characters, and what we can see of her body and arm position, as well as her stance before and after, makes it quite clear she didn't. That needs to be addressed.

For all characters, regardless of sex or body size, choosing to obey Minthara often causes the characters to walk through the altar entirely. Occasionally it gets this right – even for halflings who hoist themselves up in a believable way, when it plays correctly – but the vast majority of the time, the clipping shown is what you get. This does seem to bear some relation to whether and when you press space to jump forward, though I've had instances of it playing properly with skipping, and instances of clipping when waiting the dialogue and animations out fully (this is a greater problem throughout the whole game; once they fix it, they will hopefully fix it universally).

After this, another strange anomaly; Minthara will step in close (again... presumably she backed off at some point), and place her arms about your shoulders. For human-sized females, this lines up properly and well. For human-sized males, it clips very badly, and for small-sized characters it mostly lines up (though again, the angles are not indicative of our expected height), but as a result of the camera angles, ends up in a completely obscured shot that is very bad to look at.

Then, when the dialogue line changes, the camera cuts to what is effectively the exact same shot at a marginally different angle, and Minthara... puts her arms about your shoulders again. She never took them away, but now she's putting them back again, somehow. I don't know whether this is a failing in design, a failing in cinematography continuity, or whatever else – either way it's obvious and bad to see. Her dialogue is also very stilted here... it feels like the VA was reading cue cards with four words on them each, and it doesn't feel like a natural lingering or hesitation.

I'd like to comment, also, that the dialogue choice here is out of place: we've just had a dialogue where we had some options to try something different, to leave the scene, or to let her lead for us... and having chosen that, it now presents us with another dialogue option to either leave the scene, or continue with it... what purpose did this prompt serve? This seems like a place where they had meant to give us more options for directing the scene perhaps. Maybe we should hope that they're just not in yet? As it is it's distracting and without function.

Regardless, this opening intro sequence is posed and pitched either like an outwardly romantic scene, or else as the lead in to a passionate or erotic scene. The camera shots have been a scattering between mid range shots, and close shots to show multiple people at head-and-shoulders distance.

After this point, the standard 'scene' begins properly. The game swaps out our character models for the 'nude' versions of them. The first section of the standard scene is identical for everyone, regardless of sex: it starts with a close shot of the midsection of both bodies.







This is actually a good shot; it fits in well as an opening shot to the scene, no matter what direction it's intending to go; it's erotic, but it's mostly tasteful. It's clearly shot to give the viewer a nice glimpse of Minthara's breasts from the side, and to give a better view of our character's breasts if we're female, but it's a wide enough shot to imply sensuality, especially with the mild slow pan that it uses.

The main move here is for Minthara to take the lead from the embrace, pushing us to some one-sided heavy petting. The hand clipping is a bit bad regardless of your character.

The actual mechanics of the pose are a bit odd here – it's shot like both characters are standing up; our character is clearly not sitting on anything now, despite that being the pose we were actively put into previously. If we're standing again now, then what was the purpose of Minthara sitting us down in the initial intro (aside from the fact that she told us to lie down and we only sit)?

An issue is visible insofar as it's clear we're standing up, but our small-sized character is still level with the shot; it breaks the scene in making no sense for the position. The other part of that is that the elevated position brings a halfling's groin into view on the show, and it becomes visible that our character model has nothing between their legs; In this particular shot, you can *almost* get away with it for female characters, though not really... but you certainly can't get away with it for males. It immediately kills any engagement in the scene to see.

I'd also like to take this particular moment to take note of something else that's been bugging me; halflings have exceptionally detailed knees and elbows, in their model art. Overly detailed compared to the rest of the model, in fact – there are a lot of lines and skin stretch details there... and it becomes just... not so pleasant to notice, when the rest of the model don't have that degree of detail. In particular, human-sized models do not have that degree of detail; int eh drawn sense, they mostly only have some slight contouring detail on the model art, little else. It works for the models to be detail light there – so why have they given halflings such gratuitously over-detailed knees and elbows?

After this, the camera cuts, to show an extreme face close-up. This is the start of a recurring problem with their scene direction. These extreme face close-ups are something that Larian seems to be in love with at the moment, and it is not doing them any favours, anywhere. The face scans they use are highly detailed, and they clearly want to show them off – that's great, however, they're not achieving whatever they're hoping to by doing this. Extreme close-ups are meant to show peaks of emotion or tension, and it is the detail of that extreme of emotive expression that sells them. The faces we have are exquisitely detailed... but they are also extremely wooden. These are flat, bland, empty, plastic expressions that try to show a facsimile of an emotion or a feeling by moving the mouth in certain ways, but that's more or less it. This shot is meant to show us Minthara apparently enjoying our touch; it's got the right elements of that, in some ways – head back, eyes closed, something or other going on with the mouth, I suppose... but the overall animation and expression is flat. Her face looks 80% the same as it always does; there's no extreme of expression here, at all... and if there's no extreme of expression, then why is there an extreme close-up that obscures everything else but itself?

It's also silent. Completely silent. With the move to overt petting and hand-genital stimulation, we've moved the scene away from any suggestion that it's intended to be purely romantic. If it's meant to be sexy and erotic, however, music overlaying complete actor-silence is the worst possible choice they could make, in that case. Passion and eroticism is only communicated partially by visual; motion and sound are both important factors, and to a certain extant arguably more important than the raw visual in communicating passion and eroticism at least. Coupled with the plastic expressions, this is winding up to look and feel like a couple of dolls clacking together, and is liable to be equally unerotic, unsatisfying, and generally uninteresting to watch or engage with.

If it's being intended not as a somewhat tasteful passionate/erotic scene, however, and wants to be a full adult ero-game sex scene, then their focus on visuals fits – but the frequent cuts to extreme face close-ups doesn't add to that goal – it detracts from it, and more to the point, we already dashed any idea of that working when our attention was drawn to the fact that the models weren't 'complete' at groin level. If we're going for ero-game sex scenes, then we've checked the first box in the the 'for pornography' bible – “scene beginning with heavy petting of a/the focus female”.

The camera cuts again; this is the fifth or six camera cut in under ten seconds. How are we meant to engage with anything that is going on when the camera is hard-cutting every two to three seconds? Especially when the character poses often change in between those cuts, as it does here. There is no type of intimate scene – whether romantic, tasteful, passionate or pornographic, that is well served by such a rapid string of camera cuts. This is only bad for the scene.

This cut is to the absolutely traditional 'push her head down' transition to blow job. This is a porn trope. This is a declaration that you are intending to make full-blown adult content. It's also the second check mark in the golden rule of porn choreography.

Transitioning into “woman gives man blowjob on her knees” is the absolute strongest staple of modern vanilla porn. As is putting oral sex at this point in the scene. It also makes beyond zero sense for a scene that started out suggesting that it was going to have D/s elements, with the female placing herself in the Dom's role. Again, there is no communication between the actors here whatsoever – no sounds, no words, mildly amused but mostly only passingly interested plastic facial expressions. This feels like it is all and only about the visual; another staple of traditional made-for-males-by-males porn (which I don't mean to criticism necessarily, but that's what this is now appearing to be, very clearly and obviously, and considering what was promised in the intro, many will find that off-putting).

It's worth mentioning here, that this blowjob cut – the scene of Minthara giving your character a blowjob on her knees, with your character holding one hand on top of her head, which occurs during the default “Minthara is a Dom” scene, is the Longest Single Uninterrupted Cut in the entire sex scene. It is more than two seconds longer than any other cut. Why? It does not even belong in this scene, let alone having pride of place as the longest uninterrupted cut.

The blowjob cut plays for everyone, regardless of character size or sex; this is also a problem. For the human-sized male, the shot takes place mostly from behind Minthara's head, and obscures the theoretical details... however, as it moves to the next scene, with the characters moving up onto the altar properly, we have a clear broad cut of the sitting male and Minthara's head – and the painfully obvious lack of male anatomy in centre screen... Minthara has obviously decided that the character is aroused enough to move onto phase two... but the only possible way that that shot would not be showing off his erection would be if he was not, in fact, aroused at all. Neither answer – that it should be there but isn't, or that it's still asleep after all that – is an acceptable answer.

The shot plays out the same way for female characters; for human-sized females it looks silly. The position and the angle of Minthara's head, relative to what we can see of the player character's hips and groin, are still those of giving oral to someone with a penis. There is no possible way that this could be construed as giving oral service to someone with a vagina – and anyone in the regular practice of doing so can see that very clearly – Minthara is nowhere near anything fun. The shot removes any possibility of imagining it as such. For small-sized females, the shot remains unchanged, and so it lines up even more poorly and makes even less sense; there's little need to comment here other than to reference the screenshot.

At the end of the blowjob, there's something I'd like to point out. For male characters, the camera cuts to a side shot of Minthara finishing her oral servicing of the male, and looking up at him from her knees. This is another archetypal porn shot – it's sometimes called a 'good-girl shot', especially with the hand on the top of her head like that. It's another check mark on the golden list for that kind of scene. What's interesting to point out here is that only male characters get this shot. For female characters, small and human-sized alike, the timing of the camera cut and the animations is deliberately shifted by about a second, with the female player characters putting their leg up on Minthara's shoulder before the cut takes place, subverting the shot. I've double and triple checked this a half dozen ways and it is no coincidence – though the animations are the same up to this point, the cutting has been deliberately tweaked to give males that traditional porn shot after their traditional porn blow job, while it is deliberately avoided for female characters. Why?

I'm going to point it out here as well – our female characters look like they're in pain, or else deeply confused, throughout the blowjob scene. Of an irony, it is arguably, the most expressive our female character's face is throughout the entire scene.

In terms of choreography and transitions, this end of the blow job scene, in to something else also just doesn't work; in silence, and with no communication between the actors, our player character decides, while getting oral, to just slap their leg up on top of Minthara's shoulder... for a male to do this, it would only really serve to make the position more awkward for the woman, and it leaves a big 'why' hanging in the air. A female could be attempting to draw their partner in closer from the invisible penis hover in to something more useful, but that would require taking that invisible penis hover as an actual thing... also, just one lazily thrown over knee – and it is a lazily done motion – isn't really indicative of increased passion or a strong desire for more. The move just makes very little sense, except in the case where both actors are already aware of what poses they're moving through to next, in advance, and are going through those motions, like adult actors... which is, as result, what it ends up feeling and looking like.

Up to this point, we've had a lot of rapid camera cuts, a number of extreme face close-ups on faces that look only mildly interested I what's going on, and a few changes of position, but despite the number of cuts, actual character motion from pose to pose is often not well communicated and creates another note of background dissonance in the sequence. The progression is: Mini tells us to lie down → we sit → there is some close embracing → cut to us both standing again → some petting → cut to us sitting again with no indication of movement, Minthara is at the very least already crouching somewhat, before she is depicted moving to kneel. This just doesn't flow well.