The point of a sex scene, like any scene in a story, is to convey information to move the story forward in some way. They're meant to convey the advancement of the individuals involved. The problem in a roleplaying game is that we the players control one of the characters, which means that in a sex scene, there will inevitably be a lot of players who don't mind sex scenes in principle but will look at what eventually ends up in Baldur's Gate 3 and say 'that's not my character.' I think the explicit sex scenes in the Witcher work because Geralt is fundamentally a settled character. He can develop in some different directions but he's basically the same person in everyone's game. Our Tavs and Shepards can be wildly different, down to being different species in the former's case. Our Tavs can be nobles, entertainers, wizards and barbarians. Yet unless Larian is willing to get quite granular in a way that might not even be to the benefit of the sex scene overall, then they potentially can all have sex in the same way. So for a large section of the audience, regardless of the quality of the animation, those sex scenes will effectively take our character out of our control and have us just watch our character not really being our character for a while.
Quoting this to bring it to the fore again; poor choreography and porny scene direction aside, lack of pacing and bland expression and action aside... In a game where we are playing our own character, whose personality we decide on, if we have intimate scenes that are actually shown, we must have some leverage over how those scenes play out; some choices we can make to tell the game what our character is like or wants in this deeply personal moment - this really matters, for the scene to fly, and land, properly, even if we assume the other elements are all improved. In D:OS2, these scenes were conducted in prose, and we got to decide what out character wanted, and how how they wanted their personal encounter to play out; your character could tell your partner what they needed, and the player could tell the game how their character wanted to act, and while it was only a small impact on the prose that came out of it, it was impactful all the same, and it enhanced character immersion, rather than detracting from it.
Something similar here would be ideal - a way to at least partially indicate what sort of a scene our character would pursue. If we don't have that, and our character has a pre-scripted sexual encounter that runs like clockwork and does things that our character might not want or might not be into, etc., that's destructive for immersion and a time where character immersion should be a priority.
Yes, I thought about it and this is indeed the big reason why it would feels so awkward to me : the dissonance between how I see my character and how those scenes are depicted (based on the one scene with Minthara at least). Well put, you two!
For good mesure (because some of the answers feel weirdly disconnected) :
Originally Posted by MelivySilverRoot
The view on this goes beyond the first post and the circular discussion that has started afterward. Nuances were brought up after the OP and in other duplicate threads.
Last edited by MelivySilverRoot; 28/12/2211:18 PM.
