Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Lets talk about Romance, the Birds and the Bees

So right out of the gate I appreciate Larian's efforts in adding in some more intimate scenes with whomever you choose to romance or honestly at this point the buffet of choices that appears at your camp after the Druid Grove arc. That will probably get changed by the time the game fully releases but this whole thing makes me think of what happens after the boinking.

So lets say my character turns down Shadowheart for Lazeal.
Do any dialogues or interactions change? The amount of permutations are probably crazy but surely some things can get added?

Like if I get a nat 20 on an attack maybe Lazeal would have a comment like "Oh gee that decapitation was so hawt Tav. Guess who is getting lucky tonight!" meanwhile Shadowheart says "Ewwww I think I am gonna puke"

You know... things like that! Right now after the Druid Grove boink session it feels like there is no difference between romanced character vs an unromanced character.
Maybe later in the game where we are exploring each character's fundamental story moment maybe we can pull unique dialogues because they had been romanced?
Anyway my point is there is a lot more to "Romance" than a very well mo-cap cinematic moment in the game, I hope Larian delivers on this aspect of the story they are trying to tell, I really want Larian to unseat Wenduag romance as the best TTRPG romance so far.

What about you guys? What are your thoughts on this?

I do hope they will expend on learning about you companions via friendship. Astarion and Gale post sexual intercourse scenes are a good example of that. It adds a good reason to care about some companions so you can explore their story and not solely to see fluff like some explicit animations.

If they add nuance to *any* interspecies romance, that would be great, but...I won't be holding my breath.

You know, I have always wondered where the phrase, "Birds and the Bees" actually comes from? I guess I can understand the bird angle, but bees? I am no emtomology expert, but other than the Queen and her royal affairs, I think most of the bees do not participate in mating. The worker bees get up every morning and fly out to hit the flowers, then come home in the evening and grab a beer or whatever, then go to bed in their cell until the next day when they do it all again. No romance, no one-night stands, no drunken Christmas party regrets, etc.

It doesn't refer to bees romantic lives, it refers to how bees participate in romantic lives of flowers.

On the topic: we kinda talked about it (nuance, friendship) for whole 2 years on this forum. If Larian didn't get the idea by now... I don't want to entertain this thought for real.

Yeah I wish their dialogue and idle banter would somewhat reflect the courtship. DOS2 did this where speaking to a companion after romancing them would make them address us in a more heartwarming way. Which is why I loved Sebille so much, who goes from a cold 'n' deadly ready-to-pounce tigress to a cute heartwarming kitten by the end of the game.

I do find it curious how english use the saying "birds and bees" for reproduction, mentioning two different kinds of animals that help with flower pollination but never mention the essential counterpart, the flower. In swedish we use the saying "flowers and bees" :P

I really hope we get the chance to create some longer-than-til-morning lasting relationship ...

This is one of things i really liked in DA:O ...
When you dated Morigan, you could stop to kiss her any time you want, and every time you were in camp you could suggest to go into tent to have some fun ... sometimes she rejected you tho, but that was fine and perfectly fitting her character. :3

Give me this and i will be happy Tav.

as far as i remember she only turns you down in camp after getting a certain book that says how her mummy plans to consume her body... i can see how that would be a mood killer

i mean every girl turns into her mom but in her case its literally

Really?
Well its ben some time since i romanced her, so i most certainly can remember it wrong ... but im quite sure she also turns you down just to tease you.

I always rat out Morrigan to Flemeth, sadly it turns out, that Flemeth never wanted to take over Morrigan, her daughter was just paranoid again.
Morrigan and Oghren are the companions, I really don't like. Plus Sebastian in DA2- three very annoying characters. At least, Sebastian get his comeupance in DAI.

Not exactly BG-3 related ... but something i really want to say ... so how about this?

I gues there is lesson to be learned for Larian ... think twice before you decide to ressurect someone for the plot purposes.
On the other hand, it seems like this is lesson Larian allready know, concidering that if Zevlor (for example) die somehow during first siege ... he is simply replaced by next Tiefling in the comand.

There is a reason, I'm done with Electronic Arts and Dragon Age. Not just that, but If you play Star Wars - The Old Republic, it turns out that they made Revan canonically a white, unhinged dude, who married Bastila, while my Revan was a black female, down to earth and Bastila went dark side ( I just find that ending more fitting for someone like Bastila). I hate it, when player decisions aren't respected, including the ones, you put in spoilers. If you don't want something to happen, don't give players the possibility. Problem solved.
I mean the old BG games had similar problems ( and both franchises, DA and BG were BioWare - don't get me wrong, BioWare is great in writing stories, but they backpaddle and recon a lot): If you kill any of the companions, that will appears in BG2, in BG1, they will appear anyway, for example Minsc, Jaheira, Viconia, Imoen. I normally kill Minsc in BG1, because I want Dynaheir in my group and normally don't need Minsc and they only come as a pair, and there he is in BG2, greeting me, like nothing happened.
I really hope, Larian doesn't do that. Given, there is a BG after BG3.

I think you might...

1. Take video games a bit too seriously.
2. Not appreciate the amount of work it would take to continue on stories from every possible ending with every possible action taken. If you want a franchise with sequels to take place and have every action or choice accounted for in every game - then you are going to end up with little to no choices in the games. Or the endings are going to end up being very, very similar as to limit the consequences of choice.

Cyberpunk 2077 would probably be the best example of this. There are like five endings in the game where you end up in different places and you can even end up with an entirely different personality. If they make a sequel where those choices transfer over they either have to pick a canon ending or put in some kind of shallow 30-60 minute prologue where all of those different endings somehow converge so that you can start around the same place. Add onto this if they gave you the ability to just randomly kill any character in the game this would add even more complexity to a sequel trying to carry over those decisions.

I'd love it if all franchise had hyper-complex decisions that spanned multiple games and nothing canon ever had to be chosen as well. But given that there are limited budgets and games actually have to come out in a span of like 3-6 years that is highly unlikely until maybe some crazy new AI/development technology comes out that speeds things up or video games start making significantly more money as to hire even more enormous dev teams.

No, I think they have a point too.

It's kinda cruddy when you play through a 100+ hour rpg developing you character's story and then find out none of your choices mattered. And not even often in a 'well the IP owner needed X or Y to happen in subsequent periods of the timeline, so that ending can't happen, so your work had to be undone'...but in very avoidable areas.

Character gender is a big one of those areas where player choice gets ignored, and it's pretty indefensible to say that it was putting too much of a burden on the devs to keep player character gender choice ambiguous in the vast majority of sequels....because most rpgs with a MC with a selectable gender refer to them using gender-neutral titles. "The Lone Wanderer" "The Nerevarine" "Revan" "The Bhaalspawn" etc. Hell, even KoTOR 2 made the effort to accommodate that particular player choice (along with alignment) So it ain't that hard. But they always gotta go for 'brown haired white male human fighter' or closest equivalent to cash in on for tie in novels etc and very avoidably do the same in sequels when they could have just kept it ambiguous. Seriously, Fallout NV used gender neutral terms to refer to the protagonist from the second game through it's entirety, including a character that met them, then a singular npc refers to their gender and now that player agency is gone. Same thing with the Nerevarine.

Obviously it's a different matter when one's talking about 'did you choose to side with the bad guys and end the world or save it and become the new ruler of the kingdom?' sort of stuff, but there are ways to address that as well. Again, KotoR 2, which had a dev time of less than a year handled it with no save import feature.

Garbage like Abdel Adrian or the ToR version of Revan should be something to avoid.

Dragon Age/Bioware games in general have gotten very retcon-y though in general, so their vaunted ability to carry over data from previous games is a little tarnished IMO. Still a lot to learn from their example though.

I'm hoping BGIII lets us keep some of the ambiguity about the Bhaalspawn, Adbdel Adrian be damned. Let us have a conversation with the brain-damaged ranger and 'refresh his memory' like KoTOR II did with Atton Rand. Nothing would kill my enthusiasm for the game faster than getting to listen to the Bhaalspawn's former companions reminisce about their adventures with Abdel.

Then it may please you to hear that Star Wars - the Old Republic is not, and never was a cannon.

Nor is KotOR btw ... at least not until that promised remaster will be released, that should canonize that story ... wich may (but this is purely my own speculation) also mean that we dont get option to pick our Revan this time.

Agreed 100%.

I heared there are some strong signs that Mass Effect 4/5 (depends, if we count Andromeda or not) ... will also follow only one possible end from 3 and ignore the rest.
It sucks ... but its common practice in gaming industry ... wich kinda sucks even more. :-/

Two things:

1) All you said apply only if they take same protagonist into sequel ... wich can easily be avoided by, well, simply not do that.

2) 30-60 minute prologue that converge several completely different stories into one starting point, where ACTUAL story of the game begins ... is litteraly my favourite part of Dragon Age: Origins. xD
I dont even know anymore how many times i played those short stories in the beginning, but i completely lost interest when that beautifull political drama turned into "bad army, lead by bad evil dude, kill them all".

1. I never said they couldn't do that. But that isn't what most gamers want or are asking for. If you poll people on The Witcher - a lot of them want Geralt back. If you poll people on Cyberpunk - they want to continue the story of V. If you talk about Mass Effect no one really wants to play as anyone but Shepard. Is that universal? No - but there is a large chunk of the community who wants to do this. You can be snarky and say "well just don't do it LOL" or you can acknowledge that a lot of games that get popular have to keep using the same protagonist... because in most games that is who people identify with. Lara Croft, Geralt of Rivia, Kratos, Commander Shepard, V, etc. People want to play as them - they identify with them - they want more of them. And if you want those characters while at the same time clamoring for choice and diversity in endings/story the more difficult you make it to keep those stories on the same thread/account for every choice made.

2. Dragon Age: Origins was an... origins story. Not a continuation of a story. I'm not saying it can't be done, but like I said using something like Cyberpunk 2077 as an example it would be difficult. Using something like The Witcher 3 would be incredibly hard (If they ever try to continue that story)... because is Ciri alive? Is she dead? Is she a Witcher? Is she an empress?

Even if you look at just those four things related to Ciri (disregarding everything that could happen with Geralt, Triss, Yenn and all of the other characters)... you have to figure out exactly how to deal with her being alive or dead. Then if she is alive you have to figure out how to write her properly getting to the point where she is back in the mix and involved, make that make sense from every angle, put in a prologue for each one, etc.

And again - you can be snarky and say "LOL so just use Geralt and do a little prologue video and don't have Ciri, Yenn, Triss and all of the others in the game then!"... but it is not easy to make characters that beloved and iconic. It is also not easy to convince your player base that they don't want more of them or to invest in a new cast of characters.

Which is to say that...

The gaming community is absurdly spoiled and thinks about these things in an absurdly shallow way.

"I WANT THIS" does not equate to it actually being possible or financially viable.

I also want games where there is a ton of choice, where I can do just about everything, where if there is a sequel it perfectly takes into account every single choice or action I made and all of that stuff. I think it would be super cool if a game let me kill anyone and then the whole world and the sequels to the game changed based on if that person was alive or dead...

But I also realize that currently isn't really possible or realistic. I also realize it isn't a reasonable thing to say to just say "You know that insanely popular protagonist that is making you billions of dollars? Just don't put them into the next game. LOL IT IS THAT EASY!"

I don't take video games too serious, at least not more than any of you. If we weren't a tad bit invested, we wouldn't discuss about a game in a forum.
But I like stringent storylines, No matter if I read a book, watch a movie or play a game. I write stories myself and bringing back dead characters is bad writing ( well, outside of the Supernatural franchise at least). I don't think it is asked too much to just acknowledge player decisions.

About SWTOR being canon - it could become that. I read somewhere, that Disney was thinking of using the old republic for a movie or show. Which wouldn't be generally bad imo, since the setting interesting. I don't know how it is with copyright though.

It might be scratched by now though.