Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Was BG3 overly sexualized?

What it does is not the question in this context, but what it *did*.

Women used to get pregnant. Many died in childbirth. People caught illnesses. Without a group supporting them, the first weeks and months of the life of the child could be deadly. Poverty was likely with the wrong or an absent husband.

We can do something about the first nowadays: it is no issue anymore if you’re well-informed. The second is no issue anymore. The third is answered by Condoms. The fourth is fixed in the EU (mandatory time off the job after childbirth). The fifth — that’s still an issue. But can be avoided by not getting pregnant.

In short: most of the reasons that made sex dangerous are gone thanks to technology, education, and a social safety net.

Children in "rainbow families" lead a life that’s proven to be just as good as those in monogamous families, *if* there is no grudge between ex-partners. The latter is a matter of social norms and expectations.

Well said.

No, it's not.

Simply put, broken families and divorce rates are unhealthy. Open sexuality is viewed by many as a moral contagion that breaks apart society. Children from single parent homes are far more likely to encounter serious problems throughout life.

It is exceedingly more complicated than most either realize or are willing to admit.

If someone genuinely wants to understand why open sexuality is more frowned upon than violence then that person has to be open to viewpoints more elaborate than "love is love." Often however, I suspect folks aren't necessarily interested in truly understanding so much as condemning, using the "violence v/s sex" as a rhetorical weapon.

I'm not entirely sure where the connection between open sexuality and broken families, divorce rates and single parents is coming from.

Open sexuality, doesn't necessitate any of those things. All it means is that sexuality isn't hidden away. I.e. More education about sex (Including safe sex), more understanding of sexualities and more understanding of body diversity.

Broken families comes from individuals not respecting their partners.

Divorce rates comes from people being pushed into marriage (Which can be exacerbated by "No pre-marital sex" ideals)

Single parents comes from either unsafe sex (Made worse by the lack of education and availability of safe sex) or aforementioned premature marriages and subsequent divorces (As well as widowing which is a result of many factors such as disease, crime or war).

Nothing about open sexuality has quantifiable negative impacts, unless you have the myopic view that open sexuality = extra marital sex.

Religious rules around sex are bronze age relics conceived to assuage male insecurity about competition for female attention. The same mindset views violence positively as a male virtue. Thats why "open sexuality" is viewed more negatively than violence.

It can always be understood in terms of male insecurity.

That is certainly the popular mainstream opinion.

I would suggest that the more you consider human nature and pay attention to the breakdown of societal values the more you'll start to realize that the consequences signal an overall decline.

In a handful of decades the nuclear family has been more than decimated. It is a splitting of the basic social unit, as devastating to society and culture as the proverbial splitting of the atom.

For fucks sake, I'm so very over conservatives trying to tell me that the decline of the nuclear family is a sign of increasing moral decay and trying to prop it up as the most basic of familial units, when the nuclear family as we know it is a familial construct built up as the norm only over the last 100 years. Multi-generational and/or mixed-family households are the more traditional family model across multiple human societies in history and provide more support and stability over the nuclear family. That simple fact aside, the rise of open sexuality has not killed the nuclear family (cis-het people getting married and having kids are still the majority. Persecution complex please leave), and it wasn't open sexuality that killed the nuclear families of me or any of my peers, it was economic pressure and the societal expectation to get married and have children at a young age before either person really knew who they were or what they wanted, leading to an unstable family life, resentment, hatred, trauma, then divorce.

I'm not interested in understanding your opinion. I was raised religious, and much of my family remains conservative. I saw what it did to my family, and to the families around me. I lived that life already and i would like the world to be better after I leave it.

Nevertheless, it remains the answer to the question that was posed. Essentially: why does so much of society seem to care more about sex than violence?

It's not surprising that there's a visceral knee-jerk reaction to the notion. I understand. As mentioned above, the popular mainstream opinion believes otherwise and challenging that belief can be scary to one's identity.

Wyll won't have sex with you at the party either. I think, both him and Shadowheart have their first and only sex scene in act 3. Which seems to be pretty reasonable, given that by then you are dating for a while.

Karlach would love to have sex and generally be able to touch , but she can't, so you don't have sex with her either. If you tell her, you are interested, you can have sex with her in act 2, but you can also tell her, that you are not interested in sex.

I agree mostly with the rest of what you said. I'm ok, if there are sexualized situations, you just can deny. You can kill Haarlep, you can just say no to Abdirak ( I guess a BDSM session counts), you can say no to everyone offering from the companions or other NPCs. I'm ok with that.
I was a bit put off at how quickly some companions come at you at the party, but it got better after recent patches. Now it's only Lae'zel and Astarion and those two make sense tbh. Lae'zel is pretty direct in what she wants and Astarion wants to get you on his side.

Is this really the place to discuss your personal viewpoints about family and sex positivity?

To answer fylimar’s rhetorical question: no it isn’t!

Let’s respect the fact that we’re all entitled to our own views on these real-life topics without being directly or indirectly judged by folk on a gaming forum, and part of that respect should mean avoiding sensitive social or political topics wherever possible or not directly relevant.

Probably not. I do find it difficult to discuss the "sex versus violence" question without delving into the territory, unfortunately. It's like there's a question being asked but the answer isn't necessarily welcome.

And it really goes to the heart of the actual thread topic: is BG3 overly sexualized? Well, what does overly sexualized mean? If someone feels like the answer is yes, is it reasonable to explain why the answer is yes?

I often get the feeling that it's okay to argue for "sex positivity" but it's frowned upon to express an opposing view. I think there's something intrinsically wrong with that.

All the same, I suspect there's not much to be gained from continuing the conversation.

Of course it was delibetate.
Larian realized that they had a broken, disjointed mess at their hands and decided instead of trying to deliver a epic adventure like BG1/2 did to go for the lowest common denominator. That meant both removing all consequences for your action (tadpoles, which required complete story rewrites to shove the Emperor in last minute) and putting sex front and center.

Both in marketing, the prominently placed bear sex scenes, the constant mentioning of the possibility of sex in interviews, highlighting that they used intimacy coordinators despite the result not really warranting them, the rather useless genital customization that got highlighted, and so on.
And in the game, often to the detriment of gameplay and story, by rewriting characters to be more bland, "waifu" and most importantly, willing, by basing their characters on the common visual novel templates and Twilight novels, adding some more side sex scenes and pillow talk which in its worst cases devalues otherwise interesting characters like Rafael and also basing the choice of companions to implement not on what would be best for the game, a new class or race for example, but one who the EA players thirsted for the most with the only content added being aggressive polygamy.


And the sadest thing is, it worked. BG3 gets praised to no end, not because its a good BG game with a story worthy of its name and impeccable mechanics, but because the aggressive sex marketing drew in lots of people with no interest in RPGs and no frame of reference about its quality who are only interested in Astarion/Shadowheart being hot while shouting over any requests for improvements to the actual game and story with demands for more kisses! and sex with Driders/other character!

I completely agree with you, just with every word.

Sex is shoved wherever it can be, zoophilia, illithidophilia, threesomes, brothels. Yes, I appreciate romantic story lines in games. But romantic story lines with a well-written plot and aggressive polygamy are, after all, different things. It was very sad to learn that BG3 was originally intended to be a normal classic RPG with a single companion romance. It feels like it's now a dating simulator where everyone around you is out to get Tav. Or a sex store, rather than an RPG where you're encouraged to pick out items to taste. No roleplaying, immersion, much less sincere and deep attachment to a companion character is out of the question. Just choose your "department" and "product". For example, Astarion, after Ascension, now becomes a "product" for those who like to be strangled on their knees, shoved and punched in the face. It's okay that among the players who choose this path, there are a lot of players who just hate this content or are even traumatized by these scenes.I'm not talking about the damage it does to the story, so much so that it becomes physically impossible to play. It truly angers me that I could have avoided every possible perversion in this game as much as I wanted (ew, gross, okay, nonsense, no one's forcing me, that's how I thought of it all before), but still I was just forcefully shoved into the perversion, with no choice, forced to experience it all. "Oh, there's a choice not to ascend him" - no, sorry, I'm not choosing a pixel dildo for myself, I'm immersed in an RPG, some people are capable of deep attachment to their companions, and are not at all interested in him "being hot", but interested in his well-being. It's not a romance appropriate for an RPG, it's really a template for a visual novel, and a third-rate novel at that, no hint of roleplay, and the logic and story are just crumpled up and shoved in one place for the sake of hype and "moral lessons" on "Why deep monogamous relationships are evil".

I'm not against polygamy at all, I don't care at all, but monogamous players exist too. The players exist, but the lines for them don't. You can't tell your companions in the first act that you're already in a relationship, there are no such words because the game has a "second place", the game thinks you came here then to sleep with two companions at the same time or in parallel. There is genital customization, though. How about customizing roleplay-appropriate lines instead? Even in the second act you can't say no to Halsin properly, you can't ask that oak-faced bear if he's blind. Can't he see that you're in a relationship? You can only talk about your relationship in a way that makes it sound like you're kind of okay with "kissing the bear" too, but kind of pondering. Monogamous relationships are exposed as "possessive", "stuffy", doesn't that sound like aggressive propaganda? Sure, you can show all forms of relationships between people, but show them, not impose them. Otherwise, the "good hero" goes around the world happily f**king everyone to great applause, while the "monogamous villain" has to realize his/her own inferiority.

I've read players' outrage that they didn't do this and that, bugs and all, but they did "kisses". I'd be so damn happy as a kissing-affected consumer of this content, if Larian had instead listened to the requests of those players who asked for other, non-sexual content.

I used to like romance in games. But a classic monogamous romance between a man and a woman, without perversions, with the possibility to bring the beloved companion to such a final, where he is satisfied and does not suffer (to the "evil" final, if this companion is evil), it is, of course, very difficult to do, it is capricious players do not want to understand the great and ingenious idea of "sex education", do not want, you know, to realize all the "advantages of free relationships". In all games where romance is provided for at all, there was such a possibility. All of them.

I really hope this is still Larian's "experiments" and not a trend of modern RPGs. Obsidian are making their next game without romance, and that sounded like a great advertisement to me, though I didn't think so before. The sexualization of the game in BG3 reaches such heights that I want to see games without it at all, just so long as I don't see it anymore.

The worry for me is that other game devs see the success of BG3 and try to emulate it, thinking (perhaps not wrongly) that its success was due to the sexualisation of the story. It might be hard to find RPGs in the future that present a more balanced view of sex or just let us adventure in peace without all the dating rubbish.

Okay folks, trying again.

Let’s try to make this friendly and constructive and take out the unnecessary social or political commentary. The discussion here perhaps inevitably touches on real-life, very personal issues and I’m not seeing anything like the amount of care and consideration I’d expect when discussing such topics here.

Everyone should be able to participate in a forum provided by Larian for their fans to have friendly discussions and connect with each other without feeling that their personal lives are being attacked, or that they are forced to step up and defend them.

The company spent a lot of resources to implement this additional content, which did not allow them to fix technical issues in the game in a timely manner, some companions are still not fully implemented (Minthara), so I hope that other companies will pay attention to this as well and not follow this trend after all.

Proof of this assertion?


No one outside of Larian management knows the answer to how much resources were devoted to this and how that may, or may not have impacted other demands.

In any event one could make the same argument about any aspect of the game “they spent too much time on dyes..” etc etc

Given how popular some of the romances have been it seems Larian probably made a good decision. How much have to the romances contributed to sales and revenue etc etc.?

We've already established that the marketing for this game was horribly over-sexed, and it's set up a rather incorrect perception of the game outside the fandom circles. As i said before, they could have put more sex in the game and i still would not think it was too much.

There's only been one major update that's been very focused on the relationships and adding new stuff to that, and it was the valentine's update. Every other update has had a mixed bag of bug fixes and content, and there's still content to come, although it will apparently be evil focused, so I'm expecting more epilogues for evil choices made at the end of the game.

I would not blame the slow rate of bug-fixes on the the team somehow being forced to focus on the relationships in the game, I'd much rather direct people to something said by Swen regarding the relationship with Hasbro, and how Hasbro pushed for the 2023 release, which means the game was effectively released 3/4 months too early. It's not surprising, publishers pushing release dates up and making things difficult for devs is unfortunately common practice in this industry.

I've also not found the polyam content to be excessively pushed in-game. Like most of the romantic content, it's hard to accidentally find yourself in a polycule. One of my first play-throughs was romancing Wyll, who is very much only interested in monogamy. I told Halsin no, and he took that answer and didn't push anymore. Wyll said no to the Drow twins and being a good partner I was able to politely refuse as well. Wyll is written to be very reasonable and clearly states his boundaries, both things i really appreciated. Gale's romance in relation to the polyam stuff is not as good, and I was surprised at how mean and manipulative you can be with him when he tries to establish his boundaries.

But this is a flaw in the consistency of the writing, not it's content. I wish that your interactions with Gale (and, to a lesser extent, Karlach) were more similar to your responses with Wyll in regards to setting boundaries. I actually have many such criticisms regarding the sexual content in this game.

In my humble opinion Larian did the best decision to add romances and more humane aspects like such into the game, besides Larian as a studio have multiple teams, concept artists, programmers, scripters, enviromental artists and whole other division of artists, list would be too long to mention.

I'll throw in for sake for debate that by not having romances in the game, could have left a portion of studio artists workless or either rather than having said resourcces poured into the game could very well have just been another part for fallbacks instead.