Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General The Inevitable Romance Poll

Yen and Triss were completely differently handled - its not like you have multiple genders and sexuality to consider when doing Witcher - it was easier and focused there. Comparing that to what Larian has to do is not fair to Larian. They have so much more technical challenges and just the amount of combinations to go through. The Witcher series was something very different than 'traditional' RPGs due to the existing characters. I love it for what it is, but it shouldn't be compared to games like BG3 - they have nothing in common beyond superficial concepts.

I would say Cyberpunk and some of the examples (like DAO, KotoR) you listed are part of the old approach to it. You had a very limited amount of options - doesn't make everybody happy, but it didn't take a huge amount of resources from the production. Keep in mind those intimate scenes to be done well take a hell lot more effort than a regular scene (and thanks to uncanny valley they still often look worse than regular scenes). But Bioware with their fan-service and constantly expanding amount of romances have set a standard that to me didn't improve games. Representation - cool. Several dozen sex scenes to have all combinations covered - pointless, just fade to black, trust your players' imagination and don't waste time on scene that look like low budget hentai.


And honestly I'm really annoyed about all NPCs in a game constantly hitting on my character.

Same here. It's one reason why Gale creeps me out and why he's out of the pool. It's like these people in RL who have no sense of appropriateness and no empathy when it comes to hitting on someone.

I dont thing so? If you make every character player sexual nothing really goes to waste.

Also I don't think you can really claim modern games are wasting money on romances when you seemingly have no issues with older games doing them. DA:O had about the same composition, everyone but 3 romancable with Morrigan and Allister having significant romance story involvement.

People like sex, they like romance. And so what if it's hentai?

Even Elden Ring had romance.

If anything later Bioware titles haven't had enough Romances.

I can say with complete sincerity that part if the reason Andromeda failed is that there want enough romance diversity, or maybe it's just that the romances were bad, but no one was thirsting over Liam or Cora or anyone else really.

Things in this department didn't change since EA patch 3 for me, there is still just one wizard with a cat present

+1
Is this a fantasy world sword and sorcery rpg game, or an otome game?
Are we heading towards:
Quest - kill 5 Selunites to gain 10 points of approval from Shadowheart. Torturing to death - bonus 2 points per kill. Reward - she will hold your hand in public.

@N7Greenfire: I'm just answering this last time as I don't want to drag on derailing this thread. If you need anything else PM me.

The problem is scope. Older games like DAO or focused games like W3 had far less development time invested on sex scenes. You don't seem to have the understanding how much work goes into romance scenes, especially in BG3. 'Playersexual' doesn't solve the problem, it is the problem in BG's case because of all the races with different body sizes need to fit together - if you don't work in animation you have most likely no clue whatsoever how problematic these cinematics are. I had the pleasure to work on just a minor part of one of the AAA-sex scenes and they are so much more demanding technically to get them right than anything else.

I have no issue if someone likes hentai. All the power to them. I have an issue with content quality in games because it is my job. Those sex scenes don't look good in games because of video game limitations and even for the poor content quality they eat up a lot of time. That's why I prefer not doing them. Uncanny Valley is a thing and sex scenes are one of those places were it always becomes obvious. I rather spent resources on other parts of the games than the unproportionate amount needed to make those look 'decent' enough to not be ashamed of the quality.


And no - Andromeda didn't fail because of lack of romances, it was a game that had a lot of issues. No romance could have saved it.

But . . .but . . . 'love conquers all', surely?

My issue is that I am unsure what the mood is, which I will have.

If I feel like being (overly) evil, I would go for Minthara, when playing nice I will go for Karlach. It would be weird to try dating a women that isn't stronger than me. =P

Also, you kinda forgot the Guardian.


I never get this one. Is it really common in the US to forbid such a thing? Where I am from such a ban would be illegal. Wal Mart certainly tried, but lost in court.

Its a thread talking about romances so I think we can talk about romances but hey that'd your prerogative

Do you have sources for any of these resource numbers? At worst they just have to animate every sex scene twice one for tall pcs and one for short

Also romances are worth the resources to most, as plenty of players enjoy them. There are single indie developers making h games on steam that can do it.

Anyway later.

I believe there is a reason so many great movies and books have romance in them. And you don't go calling them romance movies or books just because they have those stories.

There is only so much universal things that alsmot all people can relate to and I think love is one of them - be it the metaphysical or physical kind of love. It's not surprising people find it enriching in the stories they experience.

And I'm happy more games have this optional component woven into them and that it's not just an afterthought anymore. I don't think BG3 goes into a direction you just pointed at at all.

I don't have the numbers, but listen to Sven in the last interviews (I think it was the PFH) where he talked about rigs.


Its not 1x Large and 1x short one.


Lets start with the basics:
I will make an assumption here - humans, tieflings, elves, gith and half-elves most likely share a rig (= skeleton which gets animated)
halflings, dwarfs and gnomes (goblins as well) most likely same thing.
I would have to check the heights, but there is a chance dragonborn and orcs have the same rig + tail for dragonborn (otherwise those 2 might be separated as well or half orcs use the human one).

Now multiply that by 2 for genders. Lets ignore the bodytypes because I've not seen enough to say how many there are and what possible can be reused.

Since males and females usually move very differently (think of female Shepard's complaints about their male walk) you will need to keep the animations done for both genders.

Ok, that's 6 sets of custom animations for each one of the characters involved in the scene (probably all created just to be used in these scenes and not in the average game) - lets assume the origin characters have always the same animation and role in their own scene - that is also assuming that when you play origin characters they don't have their own animation when in someone else's sex scene (so all male average will act like Astarion when sleeping with Haslin).
This puts us a 6 different sets of animations + origin character per sex scene.

That's just the animations. Now the different sizes might mean different camera and light setups - which would be probably up to 3 different setups, and just looking at Haslin's scene its not 1 camera angle and done.

Add to that special effects for narrative reasons like Haslin's transformation or other cases.

All of this in scenes that have high quality expectations because they are important to players, while the camera is often close up, a lot of touching is happening with things like hair and softer body parts like breasts - all things that can't be simulated with video game character assets (so if you want those to look good you actually would have to do custom solutions for those scenes are not feasible for the regular game due to performance).


Comparing that to Geralt having sex scenes with chosen female characters 10 years ago when the graphical fidelity was way lower. Or games where those scenes fade to black - its a tremendous difference in effort and time spent.



Sure you can make shortcuts and lower the quality of each of those, but that's my point - if you are doing cinematics you should have a certain level of consistency at least in the main ones (main story, important side quests, romances,...). If you can't it will look off in the game and that usually isn't something AAA game devs want.

They don't necessarily need to do another set for each gender theres a good chance the queer pairings will place the pc in the opposite genders role.

Infact I think we can see this from the pfh trailer there's a fem pc that'd is taking Astarion's position for bear sex.

That probably what's going to happen. Not great for top gay dudes or bottom gay girls but it takes care of the most people without having to do a another full set of scense.

Also larian has had plenty of time and money to do all this.

Bear sex alone probably recouped all the romance development costs alone with the viral advertising, it jumped up the game to number 3 on steam.

You can personally not like romances, thats fine and I can respect that opinion but the steam sale chart proves most gamers are hopelessly horny.

Animation sets are not just about being on top or bottom. Its every movement involved - and sometimes engines can't even translate animations for one rig to another. Shadowheart isn't running like Wyll - nor does she stand like Wyll or Lyzael. These are animation sets. If you start using gender neutral movements in the sex scenes - well yeah, that's cutting the quality significantly. Will still not solve cases with different heights as big as halfing to human or even dragonborn.


I won't go into the other arguments.

You have to elect a leader, but you don’t have to romance parasite infected assholes.

I haven’t voted but if I had to choose I would pick Karlach - mostly because due to her absence I have no negative feelings toward her. It also depends on who I will end up playing as.

I’m still dithering about what character I’m going to use for my first playthrough, but I’m leaning towards my tiefling wild mage, who “romanced” Astarion in my EA run. From what I’ve seen, though, I think she might like new Wyll so I’ve voted for him in this poll. But she’s not one to be tied down and is all for going with the flow so it could be neither, or both, or someone(s) else entirely!

I am most interested in Shadowheart and Minthara personally. Particularly interested in seeing where their personal quests go. Though I might end up romancing Lae'zel later down the line in my latter playthroughs as well. My first playthrough I'll be a Rogue Assassin Dark Urge so I'm thinking I'll romance Minthara first. I don't particularly care much for Karlach...seems a bit too stubborn about being good, and that's not what I'll be doing...maybe if there is an interesting way to corrupt her then maybe.

Ngl, that would be really funny if you needed to torture a bunch of people to death for Shadowheart to be like “FINE, 4 minutes of public handholding PER DAY, but NO EYE CONTACT while it’s happening.”

I am going to enforce strict celibacy in my party.

Cold showers every morning followed by a breakfast of old-school 1820's style graham crackers*

Then off to work.


*These were originally invented to discourage sexual activity.

Are you going to mod out the party scene then? Or just send everyone to horny jail the next morning?

Presumably the dog has to be race changed to a shiba inu and given a bat too then? Quite the extensive modding.