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

Notwithstanding the “people are saying” weakness of this statement it in no way substantiates your claim that “We’ve already established that the marketing for this game was horribly over-sexed”.

What do you even mean by over-sexed? At what point does marketing become “over-sexed”? How do you measure the point at which “over-sexed” marketing tips from plain “over-sexed” into “horribly over-sexed? Are there other intervening levels such as “seriously over-sexed” or “extremely over-sexed”?

I think it’s fair to say your opinion is there was too much sex somewhere in Larian communications regarding BG3 and possibly in the game itself, but that is a far cry from saying “we’ve established” anything beyond your opinion.

Lastly who are the “we” in your “we’ve established” was there a blue ribbon panel formed?

Thanks for trying to explain own opinion back to me. I would never have understood it without your excessive pedantry.

Yes.

How did you managed to get 20 pages out of this?

Glad to have helped and also glad to see now you correctly acknowledge it as opinion rather than “established” facts.

Or ... here's a thought:
Larian would not have hired those people in the first place (or not hired as many of them, or not given them as many work-hours), and instead hired/funded more people focused on the other aspects of the game. That's how production works, not just in making a video game but in any economic enterprise.

And as I said above, there are limits to the number of people who can work on the same thing at the same time. That is also how product development works in general.

The assertion that scrapping romance scenes would have meant addressing technical problems quicker is entirely dependent on whether Larian left the core programming team understaffed so they could blow as much as possible on everything else.

I think that is highly unlikely as they would be amongst the most key roles, and I’ve seen no evidence to suggest otherwise.

Edit: Although they apparently don’t have the resources to fix this G Damn forum.

I seriously question whether or not Swen knows how bad this forum is.

If I knew how to start a petition to send to Swen about this forum I would. If anyone else starts one I will happily sign it.

At this point fixing the forum would be creating a whole new non-ubb board with a whole new framework, archiving all the current threads and then doing a mass migration. Not even LOTRO still has its old ubb forum, and that game just turned 17.

And even then, I feel like it still wouldn't fix the constant 504 errors.

I wonder if there is any player that has examined and read the description of every painting that appears in the game.
And yet, resources were spent creating the visuals and the descriptive text for every one of them.
Everyone can set preferences as to where resources would have been deployed better. You or I will never convince anyone that your or my pref. is better.
It's not a convincing argument.

It's also an unrealistic argument. Meaning I don't think people very often think through anything but the most basic level of the idea. It's not like the company is full of contract workers who just perform one task for a paycheck and then hope for another task so they can get a second paycheck.

These are largely salaried employees who are there. Sometimes things at work are slower or faster in your department depending on the workload.

If department A has a heavy workload but department B has a light workload, then you don't take employees from B and move them to A with the expectation that they'll suddenly be good at a task they're not trained at. Even if both departments have a heavy workload, department A getting done with something you don't happen to care about has no bearing on how long it takes department B to finish their workload.

There is. I researched and read (the descriptions are great). I like to explore all the items in a game on as detailed a first playthrough as possible.

An argument on the topic of wasting resources. Here are some articles describing the state of the game after patch 6 - bug occurrence and other problems with the game:

https://screenrant.com/baldurs-gate-3-patch-6-glitches-bugs-bg3/
https://gamerant.com/baldurs-gate-3-patch-6-graphical-bug/
https://www.thegamer.com/baldurs-gate-3-patch-6-known-bugs/
https://ciceropost.com/baldurs-gate-3-patch-6-new-bugs/
https://www.pcgamer.com/patch-6-of-...he-exe-got-completely-reorganised-again/

If you wish, you can find even more articles and player reviews dedicated to this issue. So what did they add in patch 6? Kissing. That is, they spent resources on it (of course, no one can say exactly how many resources were spent on it and what exactly could have been done instead, but definitely something could have been done). The funny thing is that there have been kisses in the game before, and they were quite "hot". It turns out that the money spent on the old kisses went nowhere - the player even with all the desire can not return these old scenes, they no longer exist, they were simply removed from the game. I agree that it was groundbreaking the first time around - yes, I hadn't seen this in games before, but then? Why spend money on remaking something that was already there and was good when they could have paid attention to the story and technical aspects of the game?

Well, tbf, Animators arn't going to be working on the graphics or story and until their next game needs them for anything, they might as well have them keep working on BG3, otherwise they'd probably fire them.

Ofcourse, the argument could be made that they could've been working on other animations, e.g. more Facial Animations (Which I hear need improvements/variety)

Yes, that's for sure. There were threads created on the forum dedicated to this issue, where players gave screenshots of animations that needed improvement. It would also be possible with new animations to bring some interesting scenes from EA back into the game that weren't included in the existing game, this would also be an improvement to the story of the game, and it's a job for the animators too.

Going by the credits, it looks like all the mocap stuff was subcontracted out anyway. PitStop Productions and Yellow Cab Studios seem to be the main contributors for all that stuff.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/150689/baldurs-gate-iii/credits/windows/

Animation are subcontracted.
Doing less thirsty romance animations does not mean that someone at Larian now has nothing to do but that less money is paid to a other company where Larian ordered animations from.
That money would then be available to hire additional employees, push the release further back to have the existing employees work for longer on BG3 of, if you have to use it on animations for some reason, order different animations that are more relevant to the story or a new companion (or some non-sex Halsin content).

My feeling is that removing romances from the game wouldn't have actually made anything better. Maybe there would be a few less bugs, but I don't think it would have freed up nearly as much money as people think it would have. I think that fundamentally, the reason the game is the way it is comes down to mismanagement. A team that's rewriting major plot and character details in the last year to several months before release of a game with this much voice acting and animation is not a team that's organized themselves well. Frankly, if just removing the thirsty romance scenes really would have let them make significant improvements to the game, like fewer bugs and more late game content than just a quest or two, that actually implies even worse mismanagemnet. If that's true, then removing romances wouldn't actually fix anything, because they would probably have just found something else to blow the money and time on.

I think that the issues we see can be traced back to the last-minute story changes that were made, which necessitated lots of new animation and voice work, and to Larian over-focusing on polishing early access content and then running out of steam as they made it to act 3. Frankly I think that the game probably would have been better if they'd focused more on character content and stories from the beginning. By that I don't just mean romances, I mean making the central plot of the game more a background element to provide momentum when needed as opposed to constantly being pushed to the fore. It really seems like companions and NPCs and side stories are what Larian gets most excited about in terms of writing, and it seems to be where their talent really lies, because that's consistently the best written content in the game and I think that with some exceptions, the game does deserve the praise it gets in that respect. So playing to their strengths would have probably led to a more coherent experience overall. And one I'd probably have enjoyed way more, personally.

The assertion I was responding to was that Larian could have fixed technical problems faster. Not give themselves more time or include other animations. Also delaying release would big a very big deal for the company as a whole. Does anyone actually know the implications, or is this just more speculation?

Simply hiring more programmers wouldn't help with that if the parts of the code that needed attention could only be worked on by a limited number of people, particularly by bringing in people who are unfamiliar with it. There's a lot more to it than just throwing money at the problem.

Ultimately, Larian included the sex and romance stuff because they wanted it in their game. Sorry if some people don't like it, but there's some very funny arguments telling others why they shouldn't have.

No, it was/is not.

To resources, if Larian had only spared us Halsin and Karlach, evil playthroughs, more than one sword and four hair models, voice acting or other useless stuff, they had had much more time for stability or bug removal (I had 4 crashes since start of EA, and one bug in one playthrough; I needed 2 days after Patch 6 for all my mods to work again. You see, I suffered enough) or for more moral talk. Clearly a mismanagement, but it's their game.

My first playthrough was with Lae’zel, and I loved it dearly.

Its moral lesson is how attraction and monogamous bonding trump even upbringing in a society in which sex is only for fun and instead leads to a deep romantic relationship that even develops into raising a child together.

How do you take from this a moral lesson against monogamous relationships?

I don’t know your source on that, but let’s assume this is true.

Then animations are the only thing that Larian could scale up quickly without getting into trouble with fixed allocated resources later on. It just required that the subcontractors spend more of their time on BG3 as opposed to their other projects.

So adding more romance scenes in patches may also be a business decision: they made vastly more money than they expected and now they spend that money where it does not risk problems later on when income from BG3 dries down and they are in production of their next game. Belgium is not a hire-and-fire country, and hire-and-fire goes deeply against the moral code of Swen (as he said clearly when he scolded other companies for that practice).