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

That ship sailed long ago.

Romance/sex options are part of the modern CRPG genre. People play as much for the story as the game mechanics and that includes the personal story and relationships of the protagonist/their character. It doesn't always include romance and sex, but it very often does. Not everyone is interested in that aspect, but lots of players are. I think it's now expected for CRPGs as much as character customization and wearing different outfits usually are.

BG3 is of course a sequel to the Bioware games, and Bioware really led the pack on all this. It wasn't much of a thing in BG, but BG2 is one of the first good examples of romance in a CRPG, and we also shouldn't ignore how games have evolved since. BG3 is kind of a successor to the Dragon Age games as well as the original BG games, just as Dragon Age was a successor to BG1 & 2.

Certainly Larian lent quite hard on that side in their promotion, but it's still quite a small part of the game really, and still optional. How much time do we actually spend in romance dialogues and cut scenes? Half an hour maybe in about a hundred hour play through? For some of the companions at least, it's not quick either. It took me most of the game to get into Sharty's pants.

Aside from the promotion, I suspect much of the complaint is due to two things. Making the companions "player-sexual" and having many of them initiate romance/sexual encounters. The "player-sexual" thing is basically a game mechanic. It's to give everyone all the options. There's upsides and downsides to that approach, but it's what they went with and I have no problem with it. Having some characters pursue you isn't a bad thing story-wise, but it does mean you can't completely ignore it. Put together and it means you hit a point a dozen or so hours in, where approval ratings can start kicking things off with several characters all around the same time, including of course characters that don't match the player's sexual orientation.

Gale is an obvious example. It's super easy to get a load of approval early on by playing the hero route. Save a couple of kids in the Grove, be understanding about his situation and you're basically there. Then if you want to do a bit of best bud bonding with him teaching you some magic, the narrator suddenly tells you the moment feels "sensual". It didn't bother me personally, but I can certainly understand how some players might just think "wait, WTF?".

I think the overall level of sex and romance is fine. What I've seen of it is generally handled well, some of it exceptionally well. But there are moments, when the game suddenly throws it at you without warning, that could probably have been handled a bit better. Halsin trying to sleaze his way in to your relationship could be taken as either quite funny or massively inappropriate, depending on the player. Particularly if you've gone for a slow burning love story over dozens of hours, like with Shadowheart. Also turning characters down often seems a bit blunt and it's not clear that they won't hate you for it. I found Wyll's reaction quite hilarious. It was just a dance man, get over yourself!

If you want an example of an RPG where romance and relationship stuff really is inescapable, look at the Witcher games. Let's skip the crude way it was handled in the original and move on to the hugely popular and critically acclaimed Witcher 3. Geralt's relationship with Triss and Yennefer (and Shani with the DLC) is completely built into the story, right from the very beginning when you are looking for Yennifer. It's your very first quest objective. You can choose to play celibate Geralt, but you can't ignore your past relationships with them. The Witcher 3 was probably the previous massively successful RPG widely hailed as a step up from what's come before, as BG3 is now.

I'm not sure it's exactly the "Player-sexual" thing as much as it is characters being designed to appeal to the majority. I.e. The lack of racial diversity between companions (With the datamined halfling werewolf gal getting cut from the game)

Which is somewhat surprising given the diversity Larian had in DoS, with the roster including a dwarf, a lizard and a skeleton who wears faces. With the argument being made that the reason for "Elf, elf and more elf" companions is so sex scenes aren't too weird (Ironic given the whole "Bear sex" thing, not to mention mind flayer sex...)

But yeah, the companions initiating romance seems to irk some people, seemingly because they feel uncomfortable when people not of their preferred sex come onto their character (Personally, I've had dudes hit on me in real life and it's never bothered me. I just politely tell them I don't swing that way and we both move on with our lives). Though there is the whole aspect of simply trying to be friends with the companions and then they're suddenly like "I wanna ride you", which is exacerbated by the fact that basically all the companions end up like this (If it was just 1 or 2 that made the most sense. For example, Karlach who's not touched anyone for years and Lae'zel who's direct and comes from a society where sex isn't about reproduction it's entirely a recreational activity)

Huh? Where/When has this sweeping assertion been “established”.

At best it’s frequently repeated opinion of a small minority of people commenting on the game. I’ve yet to see this opinion mentioned anywhere outside of Internet forums. I don’t recall a single article in the gaming media that has even come close to describing BG3 marketing as “horribly over-sexed” (whatever that means).

I've literally had people ask me "is that the bear/squid sex game?" when I talk about BG3. The last Panel From Hell around launch had a big focus on that, because it got people talking about the game who may not have been aware of it before. The EA cycle was long, interest waned, and then suddenly all the major videogame news outlets could talk about was BG3's romance and sex again. That footage made it very far outside the gaming sphere.

Hell, it even spawned a huge wave of new people coming here all eager to talk about it (or, yell about it, in some cases).

Stuff costs money. If you think it doesn't then you are the one who should be providing proof. The correct default assumption should be that all things cost money, and all things must be paid for. There is, after all, no free lunch.

Yes, stuff costs money.

However, "It costs money" doesn't indicate HOW much it costs.

The assertion was that "A lot of resources" was spent on this content.

Also, that this content being developed was in lieu of fixing technical issues.

All we know is that it costs SOME amount of money to develop, and the people who were working on it were not working on something else (If they had something else to work on. We don't know if the people who worked on it have the ability to work on something else. Developers aren't intechangeable. You can't have an artist suddenly writing bug fix code for example)

Ergo, the assertion referencing the "Lot" of resources at the expense of bug fixes would require proof.

Having two mocap characters interact with each other in cutscenes is vastly more difficult and thus costly than having a character being alone.

So all those scenes like with Minthara or even the kissing scenes they added were much more expensive than normal dialogue scenes.

Yup. It's simple common sense. All of the cinematics, including voice acting, was easily well over 50% of the cost of making BG3. And the sex-related stuff is a pretty good chucnk of all that. So it is very much a safe bet that a lot of other things were left/dropped from the game to accommodate the sex-related content and cinematics.

Yup. It's simple common sense. All of the cinematics, including voice acting, was easily well over 50% of the cost of making BG3. And the sex-related stuff is a pretty good chucnk of all that. So it is very much a safe bet that a lot of other things were left/dropped from the game to accommodate the sex-related content and cinematics.

So the voice actors, sound engineers, performance directors, motion capture crew, etc would have been fixing programming bugs if they weren't spending time on recording romance scenes?

Seems more likely they were just different teams, doing different jobs to me.

Either they would have done something more useful like making dialogues or new characters, maybe we would have even gotten an epilogue in the release version, or they would have been paid less so other teams had more time or manpower to fix buff or add more content.

This is an isolated demand for rigor. Of course we don't know exactly how much each line item on the Larian budget costs. We don't NEED a detailed description of the budget to know that stuff costs money. If its not free then the budget for it represents an opportunity cost, because that money could be spent elsewhere.

Modern economies use money rather than barter to solve exactly this problem.

It’s entirely a matter of opinion whether cutting romance scenes in favour of other dialogue scenes would be “more useful”. I wonder how many players would sacrifice the romance stuff for getting the epilogue a bit earlier?

Anyway I was talking about the specific claim that cutting them would have given Larian more time and resources for fixing technical problems. There are limits to how many people can work on the same code at the same time. It depends on how much the game engine, core mechanics, etc can be divided into pieces for people to work on separately and then recompiled.

So for that assertion to carry any weight, maybe we should have some evidence that Larian left the crucial programming tasks understaffed because they diverted too much money towards the things that some people think are pointless.

I don’t think you quite grasped the point I’m making.

Or... you didn't make a very good point.

The point is that some tasks can be done in parallel, and some can’t.

People working on cutscenes don’t interfere with the core programming at all. Whereas only so many people can work on the code at the same time. You can’t just throw more programmers at fixing the same part of the game or engine.

I would also debate that with what Dagless said, there is a good chance we would still be having issues with the game, minus all the humane aspects of romances as if playing safe with development could in theory have been a more inferior decision.

Because even if you did in theorty throw more hands on the same pie would still impose issues, perhaps just in a potential different way, I would have said a loss of opportunity if game had been less sexualized.

Teams are not as interchangeable as most might assume, you want the ones with most skill and talent to focus on their special talents and its best to only have so many on the same code to avoid creating more problems and to have things less likely to have gone wrong in more bizarre ways, whether those issues would reflect into the game or just remain behind the scenes is a matter only a person with a crystal ball would know.

Yes, we know that it represents an opportunity cost.

But the assertion being made is that it was a large opportunity cost. Both in terms of money as well as manpower.

Which would NEED a detailed description of budget as well as workload distribution to evince.

All we know is that SOME money was spent on it and that the people who worked on it did not work on SOMETHING else.

We don't know HOW much money was spent on it (And whether it would have been enough to fund any other tasks), nor if the people who worked on it could have worked on something else (If there were no other tasks suitable for those people's skillsets, then their time wasn't pulled away from anything else)

Ergo, to state that the development of this content was to the detriment of other content would require the burden of proof to be on those who claim to know exactly how much of an opportunity cost such an undertaking actually was.

One can state their wishes of having X thing instead of Y thing, for sure, but that doesn't mean it would actually fit with how the game was developed.

Me? I didn’t make the unsupported claim.

Again no one outside of Larian knows the answer as to what resources were devoted to this and how it impacted the overall development of the game. People are free to speculate of course and offer opinion which is all that it is in the end. Speculation and opinion.