Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General BG3 Going All In With Romance Scenes And Body Customization?

Nah, LOTR is not worse off due to lack of sex in it because it is an artistically elevated masterpiece with a completely different portrayal goal of fantasy, so naturally sex would not fit in it.

But for something like Game Of Thrones, which is trying to illustrate the raw, real and brutal medieval atmosphere... yes the exclusion of sex would very much change the atmosphere of the show and what it's trying to portray. The way sex is conducted in the show by various characters and cultures, has a tremendous amount of meaning and perception. It makes it far more real and gritty seeing how something that is a symbol of love can be so hideously misused and portrayed by certain characters.

So it depends on what an art is trying to portray. BG3 clearly is trying to display the gritty real world of Faerun without sugarcoating it. The very first teaser for the game has the Flaming Fist knight go through ceremorphosis. So to me it very much fits into the narrative and enhances it, rather than makes it worse.

That is the main problem. Pornography is always a scene out of context. It may have some story, but we all know it is irrelevant. But in this case, we will have hours of characters' interactions and development. People are worried that it is going to be a full porno, but after Minthara's scene, I am pretty sure that it is not going to be the case. It is part of romance and it looks to me that a lot of people a worried because all such content is associated with cringy over the top videos with extremely bad actors' performances - but it should not always be the case. Some people also connected some NSFW mods to this topic, but I think these are different kinds of players. It is not the same - trying to build a relationship with your beloved companion to see how it ends, and just walking nude the whole game. Looks like these are different people for me.

It is just a theory, but it looks like a porno spoiled people's attitude to sexual acts. I feel the same way, to be honest, and I am not sure what to think about this topic. But maybe it is good to give Larian a chance to change our minds?

Lord of the Rings doesn't have characters whose personality needs to be extended through sexual scenes. Because good characters are not commonly associated with sexuality, and more with dignity and romaticism. Evil character are commonly associated with desire, dependence and power when it comes to relationships, so a graphic sexual scene can convey all of those things properly. But in case of LoTR evil is presented more as an ambiguous entity rather than a well-defined person. Sauron is just a personification of evil and he doesn't need to have that kind of representation. I am talking about the original trilogy ofc, not the Rings of Power.

Everything you've described is applicable to the real life all the same. People meet each other, they get interested, then attracted, then attached. Then they get to decide whether they need to make a step further. If they do it can end in sex....wow, huge revelation... didn't mean to shatter someone's psyche

Our actions form our companions' affection to us. People are attracted by ones who grant them comfort. So if you've been accumulating hundreds of approval it is then just natural for either you or your companion to make this step I was talking about earlier. On the other hand, it could be great to have some companions which can deny our propositions and decide to stay friends because of what we've done or their personal reasons.

LotR is a morally uncomplicated fable of good vs evil with no grey areas and characters that are more archetype paragons than people. I say this as someone who loves Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was writing a mythology, and a heavily Christian influenced one at that. Baldur's Gate is set in the Forgotten Realms, a morally grey world with all the trappings of the real world, and characters who are broadly speaking just regular people. You think there wouldn't be a Brothel or 20 in the whole of the city of Baldur's Gate when we've seen them in previous games like Neverwinter Nights? There are already plenty of sexless RPGs out there for people to play who don't want to see nudity or anything like that. Fantasy adventure games don't need lots of things. They don't need high fidelity AAA graphics, but BG3 is investing a ton of its budget into visuals and animations. They don't need multiple races to choose from, but Larian is putting the effort in to make sure NPCs in the world respond differently based on your race and even subrace. Fantasy adventure games don't need classes, you could easily be playing a game where you're forced to be a sword-user. They don't need to have blood or murder or death either. We could have Pokemon combat where the animation involves your character bouncing slightly in the air and a white flash that results in the enemy hp draining.

Saying an RPG doesn't need something really isn't the point. Its an option that you aren't going to be forced to engage in. Even if it were for the sole purpose of titillations, why is that a problem if that's what the devs choose to add to a game? If a significant number of players want that type of content in their fantasy games, and the abundance of NSFW mods in other fantasy RPGs and their popularity gives me full confidence that they do, why fuss over it? If I don't want to play as a halfling cleric. I don't have to. If you don't want to see a nipple, you don't have to. We really should be past this sort of argument at this point. It's an adult game for adults, and is labelled as such.

Edit: Just to be clear, it's fine if you don't want to engage in the content. Not everything is for everyone. I guess I just find it a little frustrating how some people are talking like this kind of stuff shouldn't be in the game at all. Games like this should be about crafting your own narrative and responding to the world around you as you see fit. I'm personally glad that Larian is willing to push the boundaries of acceptable content in video games, especially since I remember all the controversies in the past and moral panics surrounding The Elder Scrolls Oblivion with a bugged piece of armor in the code that removed female tops that affected the ESRB rating, or the San Andreas Hot Coffee controversy. Not every game that's made has to be PG-13. I'm just trying to make the case that sexual content has just as much of a place in a fantasy RPG as all the violent content that we accept as a given.

I actually played a game a long time back with no romance, but instead centered on your party members reactions to your choices and the reaction of your soldiers and people to your actions. For example very early on if you make to many morally gray or down right evil choices one of your heavily good aligned allies sets up a trap for you as he thinks you will become a tyrant if you are allowed to become any stronger, but if you end up taking more good actions along the way and change your path before the betrayal event comes up. He will change his mind and warn you about it, help you defeat the attackers, then willingly subjugate himself to your decision as to his punishment. Knowing that what he did is treason and by law he should die for his betrayal. You can execute him which makes your soldiers respect you more for remaining true to the law, but your people will dislike this because he was beloved by the people for being an honorable man. You can also show him mercy and let him live, but your soldiers will lose some faith in your conviction to hold true to the laws and some may leave because of this. The people on the other hand will love you and your kingdom will grow larger. You can also banish him which makes both sides happy, but only partly and you lose that companion.

That's the thing though. I love romance in RPG game, but not explicit sex scene. And everything you listed there doesn't require the explicit aspect.
I love romancing companions, what happens before and after, knowing that they are about to have sex and that I get to learn more about the characters. But, again, I don't need to see in such details how they have sex. What we have in EA is enough (well, mostly, there are some missing bits and fixing needed). To me, it's not because I find it "cringe" or whatever. It's because it's just not my taste and breaks immersion.


And yes, again, this is not about wanting to remove it all :

And

The Forgotten Realms is a quite sexy / sexually liberated setting if you are familiar with the source material.

Larian staying true to source material i know that is not their strong suit but they are hitting the mark on this topic.

These are the same people that don't know how to change/skip the channels on their TV.

A cRPGs is a story-telling tool amongst other things, and I would be disappointed not to have the opportunity to make romance and/or sex part of my characters’ stories when I want to. I also understand that there are resource constraints on the amount and complexity of content that can be created and so, while I do hope for memorable moments, I don’t expect the whole relationship to be there on screen but see what is presented as being hooks or triggers for my imagination.

That said, I would be all for presenting different patterns of romance/sexual relationships. I don’t know any great examples, but I liked the “rivalmance” idea in Dragon Age 2, even though the approval system worked poorly in practice. Mass Effect Andromeda made some attempts to have its relationships developing with different beats, with some following the tried and tested route but, eg, one that could start with a one-night stand that could then either be let go with good will on both sides or else you could take a step back and build a longer term relationship.

At the very least, I do hope Larian will do more in the final release to disguise the fact that they’re limited in how they can progress romances in a game like this to help suspension of disbelief. As lots of folk have mentioned, all the propositioning at the party at the moment can be farcical.

But apologies, I think this thread is more about the actual sex scenes rather than the relationship that brackets them so I’m probably off topic.

I do agree that showing some intimate interaction is really important to bring the relationships to life, I just think a lot can be done with a few well chosen establishing scenes. I actually liked the start of the Minthara scene for example. The fact that it could start with a bit of a dominance struggle suited the character I was playing, and showing a bit of how that played out in the sex made it feel consequential and I wouldn’t have minded a few edited highlights. But the sex scene went on … and on … and on. Obviously everyone’s mileage will differ but I was in stitches laughing by the end, I found it so absurd to be watching it, which is not the right mood at all!

And despite the good points made in this thread about the benefits of including sex scenes, I still don’t want Larian to show me in detail how my character has sex. The more they show, the greater the chance that what is shown will clash with my head canon of who the character is and how they would behave with their sexual partner.

I’m sure that Larian will indeed get around this by having different options. I just hope that it’s possible to skip any extended sprite porn marathons without losing all the intimate scenes that will help add flavour to developing relationships (or indeed relationships that aren’t going to develop beyond that single encounter).

Oh, and while it’s not the whole of my objection I do admit that at least part of my concern is that, based on what I’ve seen so far, I don’t yet trust that Larian can pull off polished, convincing animation of sex. Those who have said that they still have time and we shouldn’t dismiss the possibility are of course right. I would love to have my suspicion on this point proved baseless.

I believe it all comes down to, as usual, a preference and that would be well compromised with a...you guessed it...a toggle.

I'm not sex-repulsed, but watching porn is just not fun for me. Does absolutely nothing for me and watching animated porn is, like people already said, just cringy for me.

Yes! Show me the kisses, the body language that *leads* to sex. Hell, show me full nudity and how the engaged party got there, but please fade to black after.

And, most of all, show me the pillow talk, I *hate* it when we jump out of the scene when everyone is clothed again. Is that how people have the morning after talk now?

I don’t get your argument; classes, races, fighting have always been an integral part of playing D&D CRPGs so one would expect to find them in the game…are you suggesting graphic sex is as an integral part? Do people who play tabletop D&D roleplay in graphic detail sexual relationships or orgies during their campaigns? I genuinely don’t know because I never played it.

Where did I ever state there wouldn’t be a brothel or sex in Faerun? There was a brothel in BG2, nobody is disputing that they don’t exist in D&D world. I just don’t feel you need to have vivid depictions of a blow job to somehow reveal some profound insight into a character.

I haven’t played the game in a long time but I do recall being propositioned by my companions from very early on with minimal interactions. I wasn’t forced to engage with it but it was very much shoved in my face from the outset. Perhaps that has changed in recent patches?

Shot in the dark, but wouldn't the Twitch integration option in the settings censor nudity and sex scenes?

Well it was supposed to be about the potential of what could come with the inclusion of genitals, but sometimes people are unable to separarate nudity and porn so it devolved into sex, whereas I was looking more for the realism potential the game might be going for

Such as there being mangled/dismembered/defiled nude bodies, similarly to what Diablo 2 has in ACT 1 of Andariel's Cathedral where all Sisterhood of the Sightless Eye members were tortured, quartered, dismembered and so on... to fully illustrate the corruption of Andariel.

Also since there are slavers in BG3, there might be chained up slaves being beaten to a pulp without clothes to illustrate the hardship of Faerun. Also as I mentioned in the OP, there might by dryads/nymphs which are forrest women and are usually fully nude. Moonrise Towers in the trailer also seems quite a morbid place, there might be a lot of corpses, monstrosities turned out of human bodies to portray the horror that might be going on there. The possibilities are endless to make the world more gritty and dark.

Nudity is not just used for sex, it's used to really kick realism and horror into overdrive when it comes to illustrating a dark and gritty world. It is an 18+ rated game afterall, which is why I found the news very interesting and wondering what they might do with it.


Understood. I believe they most likely will be including some sort of "No Nudity" option, as there are already signs that lead me to believe that. And sex scenes most likely will be a fade to black which will then continue after the deed is done. Though I still think it would be a good idea for people who would like to skip such scenes to write a suggestion on the forum to include an option to do so.

Shoved in your face as in Lae'zel propositioning you? That happens in the real world, and you're free to refuse. No one is forcing you to go to the sex mausoleum.

If sex exists in Toril, and we the player are taking on the roles of people who live in Toril, and another character wants to have sex with our character, and we choose to have sex with them, why is it a problem if the player gets to see their choice? You're basically arguing we don't need graphic depictions of violence. I don't need vivid depictions of decapitation to somehow reveal profound insight into a character.

Plenty of RPGs exist that lack character creation, class choices, and race choices. The Witcher is one of the most popular of them. We could easily have been given a predefined character with a narrow selection of choices and minimal dialog choices, and it would still meet the technical definition of an RPG.

And finally, how groups play D&D is entirely up to the table and what the players are comfortable with. Some groups don't want any hint of romance whatsoever, and it's nothing but combat mechanics and quest objectives, with little to no role playing. There are groups that do lite romance, but never elaborate. I've seen tables do grand romances that develop through campaigns, and offspring of the romance become replacement characters when the older ones retire, and you can absolutely find erp groups that have graphic descriptions of sex acts in their sessions. D&D is what you make it, and there's room for both celibate paladins and horny bards in it.

Ah! You’ve got us bang to rights there

With respect to nudity/genitals in general, I think in an adult game like this there certainly are scenarios in which it would be reasonable to expect to encounter nudity rather than folk in underwear (and I don’t find the underwear in game so far particularly convincing anyway). And if you’re going to show nudity then if your sprites don’t have genitals then, even if you’re not particularly zoomed in, it’s probably going to be noticeable and the smooth, featureless, nipple-less avatars you see in some games are weird and creepy.

But if you go there, you have to start thinking about things like whether sprites have pubic (or other body) hair and how much. Personally, lack of pubic hair on either men or women says to me either “doll” or “child”, both of which can be deeply uncomfortable in different contexts. But there seem to be plenty of folk who prefer no hair on one or all genders. And I have no idea how hairy your average au naturel dwarf, elf, gnome or dryad would be and don’t particularly want us or Larian to vanish down a rabbit hole of thinking about it.

I do think if you’re going to do nudity you have to do it well, and I wouldn’t blame Larian if they dodged the issue by use of strategic placement of cloth, leaves, hair, blood or limbs (dismembered or otherwise) and carefully chosen shots in cutscenes. But while that might be the safest option, if Larian decide to be brave and go for full nudity then all power to them. I’ll just keep my fingers crossed it’s done well enough to add to rather than break immersion.

Part of the problem currently is that the way they've set up, shot and choreographed their sex scenes, they make it painfully visible and clear that the character models are smooth around the bend - they could hide this with clever shooting and posing, but they don't - so aside form the myriad other major choreography problems that exist in the current scenes ("Why are you giving an invisible blowjob to my vagina-owning PC?", "Where are you even kneeling, there is zero possibility of penetration there!", "I'm a halfling, why are you kissing the altar way over over there?"), they're made all the worse by the shooting showing off with gratuitous clarity that the models are ken-and-barbie dolls where it matters!

Interesting take. Am I to understand that you believe that it should be a case of "Hey, we just met, let's bang"? While I have had that happen out here in the real world, it's usually more "leveling up the companion" by doing things like, you know, dating. Wine and dine, dinner and a movie, you know, those things we do out here because we can't go crawling through a dungeon collecting loot, or flying around the galaxy, opposing x threat, or creating it... I find it odd that the video game version of dating would seem juvenile.

It is clear as day that those scenes are underdeveloped atm.

Yes, which is why we give this feedback on them... because if we assume that everything is known about, and not finished, and 'will get fixed', then a whole lot of stuff will not, actually, get improved, but we don't know which is which, so we give feedback on what we see, which is the point of participating in early access.