Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Is BG3 bad for the genre?

As long as you can disable nudity, which you can in BG3, and it is completely optional to do that I can't really see a problem with it. It would be good if there where som kind parental controls connected to steam or something.

I think evolving characters and relationships with your companions is pretty realistic and adds a lot of depth to game and that is something that is missing in a lot of similar games.

Personally I think it is educational rather harmful for teenagers playing the game that you are able to build relationships that eventually that develops into love and then maybe even consensual sex. Especially compared to all the pornography that exists on the internet. This is way better.

Yes theres some bugs in the game, some such bugs stopped me from being able to complete Act 3.

But it still has far less bugs on release than any other AAA game for a long time (lol Starfield).

I've put it aside for now and went back to replaying BG2.

As for the adult material, I never hear any complaints bout games or movie that are rated 18+ purely based on violence. Its the same old prudish nonsense from the same old people, and kids shouldn't be playing violent games in the first place.

The problem with BG3s overreliance on sex is not that it offends prude people, but the effects on the industry as sex (and designing characters as waifu/husbando) seems to be a easy and cheap way to create hype and hide problems.

The same was Mass Effect caused most RPGs to include romance after the same formula, the danger is that BG3 causes publisher to add the same shallow softcore experience to their games.

I think some here are misunderstanding the OP. The issue is not that the game has sex and nudity in it and that these things are upsetting to people with prudish sensibilities. The issue is that for many fans of the game, the sex and the nudity *are* the true selling points of the game. For possibly millions of the game's fans, the sex and the nudity are what they're here for, and not really for anything else about the game. And if this is true, yes it is a big 'if', then the lesson for other RPG developers for the future will be: put a whole bunch of gratuitous sex and graphic nudity in your game if you want to get big sales numbers whereby people won't care about bugs or plot holes or story inconsistencies, etc., in your game.

Well the issue is in all entertainment industries, sex sells. The game reaches a wider audience. People complaining about it generate more interest and free publicity, so even more people buy it.

E.G I wouldn't have ever have heard of Sam Smith if it wasn't for the barrage of videos hating him. I wouldn't have even bothered to click to listen to any of his songs otherwise. I didn't like any of the songs and just thought 'meh, its just a male Madonna, who cares'.

Likewise loads of people would have never heard of this game without the twitter bear sex scene controversy. It doesn't need to be in the game at all, but all the backlash generates more views = more sales.

Meh, I really, really doubt this is true. There is ubiquitous, free porn on the internet if that's what people are REALLY after.

Instead, I think what likely happens is that the sex gets the game more attention. Like remember when that "bear scene" got really popular and tons of people were laughing about it? I doubt that scene *alone* made people buy the game because "OH WOW I CAN HAVE SEX WITH A BEAR". Instead it probably got a lot of people thinking, "Oh hey what a funny looking game", and then they checked it out and bought it if it sounded good to them. Sex itself wasn't what they bought it *for*, but it was what got their attention.

I also don't think that this is necessarily going to inevitably lead to people only caring about the sex. Indeed, I think it is very likely by this point that Larian is suffering because of its bugs. I think by this point many people have gotten to Act 3 and been disappointed, and as a result will think twice about buying from Larian in the future, at least on release. Sex isn't this magical factor that glosses over all the flaws in a game; indeed if it was don't you think developers would have figured it out LONG before now and games would have already become nonstop softcore porn?

What worries me more about bg3 is that alot of people might try out dnd. Only to discover that half of the game follows Larians house rules and not the dnd rules set.

Getting more people in the hobby is great. But not like this. They would basicly be lured in with fake promises. False advertisement, if you will.

And the main problem is also because they changed SO MUCH. No single aspect of the game is free of changes. You couldnt pick up dnd from playing bg3 a few times. Because youd have to go back to square 1 on most things.

So yeah I do think bg3 might do damage but not in the way OP meant.

Ehhh....I mean I have complained LOUDLY about some of Larian's (ill considered) homebrew choices (HASTE SHOULD NOT WORK LIKE THAT IN PARTICULAR), but I think some of their OTHER homebrew choices have actually been good. Even though I am a wizard main who LOVES CC spells, I actually agree with some of their CC nerfs (although I would not have nerfed them down to 2 turns from 10, that seems a bit harsh, particularly with how easy they also made it to wake up sleeping characters...). And I think the different weapon actions are genuinely fun. (I think a ot of the problem is actually down to absurdly unbalanced gear that they give you, along with the tons of superpowered consumables). I definitely don't think BG3 is so alien that people would be completely unfamiliar with 5e if they tried it out.

Thought about this, too.

As a big fan of RPG culture, I think this game may draw some, lets say, vanilla people attention to our hobby, and this may bring a "toning down" of the more... intense aspects of what we love in TTRPGs and CRPGs*.

Also, imagine for a moment, Moneyvision-Blizztard trying their hand on a CRPG. This could turn things quite sour if the community doesn't clearly distance themselves from their business practices.

Edit:

* Just watching a stream from someone REALLY enjoying the game and I can't help but think "wow, mainstream will want to remove this and that and so much more from the game to make it more palatable for the normies". Urgh. Imagine a parlamentary discussion regarding "Dark Urge" or . We have been there, remember? We have been there with all those self-absorbed do-gooders trying to ruin FPS and I feel like I really need to protect TTRPGs / CRPGs from them. I really don't want the general "Barbie and Ken in cotton ball land"-mentality that is so pervasive in Karen-dominated mainstream culture creep into the hobby I love since Ultima VI (oh, and "Castle of the Winds", if anyone happens to know that) was released.

Nerd culture is mainstream culture.

Not the nerd culture I happen to know. ;-)

Meh.

I just disabled all that in the options and moved on.

And I dont think its much of a selling point.


I really loved romancing Aerie in BG2.

I tried romancing Viconia and it was very funny, but also required to keep reputation at 18 or below and that was too much of a PITA for me.


BG3, none of the romance options have much appeal to me. Maybe I'll try Karlach some day. But maybe not.

Disable what? Last time I checked there wasent an 'disable homebrew rules' option xD

No. What people THINK is nerd culture is mainstream culture.

Shows like 'the big bang theory' are mainstream and have such a 'hello fellow kids' vibe it makes my skin crawl.

No, I don't think so. I think outright nerd culture is mainstream culture, and I say this as someone who can remember playing 2nd edition when I was very young and well before it was mainstream. I played with a kid from a catholic school and if he had been found out, he would have been made an outcast there. I actually got to witness priests telling people that this dungeons and dragons stuff was satanic firsthand. Everything about nerd culture is far more mainstream than it used to be and the world is far better for it. I mean you give "The Big Bang Theory" as an example, as if it isn't entirely mainstream to make fun of that show in the first place. It is both mainstream to watch it and to make fun of it. Being "mainstream" isn't one monolithic thing. Being non-mainstream meant being actively ostracized in some way for what you enjoyed. And the vast majority of things that were once considered "nerdy" enough to be worthy of ostracism, in the vast majority of places, are now utterly normal and banal to enjoy.

The other day I saw a massive guy at my gym lifting weights in a D20 shirt and another guy with a 40K Chaos Star tattoo.

Nerd culture is mainstream culture.

You know, I would've said the same thing myself (about free porn on the Internet negating the attractiveness of sex in a video game). But the truth is there are a great many people (on reddit and other similar places, and a few even in this forum) who openly say they love this game for the sex (and also that the bear sex escapade is what they bought the game for), so I dunno. But even this makes no sense to me, because I very strongly believe that the sex stuff was way better done in Witcher 3 than here in BG3. So may be I just can't relate to the generations younger than me anymore. <shrug>

Nudity etc.

I don't know, why would someone coming from 'mainstream' not sign up for darker themes. There are enough examples in pop culture, that dark/horror/ more difficult themes can work. I mean there are whole series with serial killers as protagonists and while Dexter might be the really nice guy, Hannibal is not. And I remember that years ago, when I worked at a bookstore, people were shocked by American Psycho, but nowadays it is considered a classic of its genre.
I mean, yes, there will always people complaining about not liking some things, but I think, that's normal to a degree. I don't feel threatened, if more people start to play crpgs. It doesn't have to be a dumb down.

But I agree, that some studios shouldn't try their hands on crpg. But it seems Hasbro themselves go into monetarisation with One DnD and the required platform.

I find the idea of a genre getting bad when introduced to the mainstream to carry a degree of arrogance to it. Game of Thrones was firmly mainstream and everyone liked it for its darkness and complexity and violence, and turned on the genre hard when that went away. I think people's idea of main stream is just a little too unkind for the most part. Im sure we'll probably see some crpgs come out geared to a more casual crowd, but I don't believe that equates to a loss of hard-core products. I even think that the hard-core audience will end up seeing a net growth (though probably not a huge one, in all likelihood) since inevitably there will be a percentage of people who want more of this kind of game and will branch out, with his as their introduction.

As for worries about games trying to include more sex for marketing, games have been doing that more and more for decades. Look at Dragon Age and Mass Effect. If its gonna be a problem, it's not BG3s fault.