Larian Studios Forums Divinity General Discussion Re: the gore/smut

The trailer made me feel really uncomfortable watching. There i said it.

Now I just hope they double down on it. I would love to see a face ripper and have the characters you use it on actually have NO FACE. Fully detailed/zoomable/photo mode.
Hope the sex scenes are even more crazy than BG3.
I hope they go so nuts with everything and show off the crazy messed up world of Divinity but actually with the budget they've always wanted. I hope we see ripped off arms, crazy build variety, and other wacky fun shit that no ones ever done before.

Basically all the stuff DOS2 had in writing i want to see actually on my screen this time and MORE.

Just because something made me feel uncomfortable doesnt mean i dont want more of it lol. Hope you dont cave to the squirmy assholes on X.

PS: add lightning mages with plate armor ill forever be your bitch Larian and Swen.

Would be nice to see the company go completely unfiltered.

Though, realistically, they'll have to tone things down to avoid AO ratings which limit the sales of the game. Even more so than 18+ already does, which is why most games always tone down to 15+. Places like Japan outright prohibit AO media, to say nothing of many storefronts refusing to stock AO rated media (There was that semi-recent game that got notoriety for its AO rating and thus multi-country ban... Callisto Protocol I think it was?).

Such is the nature of media. It always needs to be censored by someone.

Agreed, the trailer made a lingering impact on me, I felt uncomfortable the whole day after it dropped. I thought it ingenious though in terms of presentation, because playing this at an event like Game Awards have kinda reflected on how we glorify violence as species. If you think about it, basically the whole Game Awards hall was cheering after they were shown such brutal and violent footage (parallel to the crowd from the trailer itself), all it took was a Larian Logo. The whole premise gave it the deeper meaning, kinda. A very cool topic to explore narratively in-game as well.

A thought came to me, does divinity universe have Hell as a realm? I think not and I wonder if what we see is the birth of Hell out of the human sin? It kinda vibes with "the gods are dead" and "new powers stir" thing, also the statue I think is called a hellstone or something?

I know there is Nemesis as a demon plane but I think Hell is not a thing in the universe as of now.

I get what youre saying but the japan thing is so ridiculous. They literally have hentai where a girl gets all her limbs cut off and raped by a horse in an apartment building lol. They are gore galore and lolicon and shit but AO game is banned? lmao what a joke reminds me of that 20 year old 4chan meme where its like "you can show a girl getting decapitated but GOD FORBID YOU DONT CENCOR THE CLIT"

I on the other hand want a well written game with a complex story and deep characters.

But as BG3 was none of that and got all its success from waifus and bear sex and Larian wants to make the game even "bigger" I fear it will go into the opposite direction and the content will be neglected even more in favor of smut and gore.

Again.... that is not what larian does or what BG3 was like. Did you play the game all the way through? Because that's a very small part of the game. It may have helped the marketing.... but that's not why the game is successful, or why it sold well.... it's maybe 20% of the reason at best.

I don't care for smut or gore in either way: I don't need it, but I don't make a fuss about it and I do hope, that Larian will find a better path between listening to community and visualising their own vision this time. I love BG3 dearly, but some storylines and characters suffered from fandom interference quite a lot.

I liked the atmosphere of the trailer, like I said, love folk horror and mythology and the nod to film classics here was undisputable. My first thought was indeed The Wicker Man and I was hyped. I was surprised that that trailer was shown at the game awards, but it got me curious and interested.
Again, it's not the gore or the sex I care for, is story, atmosphere and in this case the wonderful music.

And in this specific scene (like again in The Wicker Man) the ritual seemed to be a kind of fertility/thanksgiving ritual with a dark twist, so I think the gore was fitting, the sex scene was grotesque on purpose (it seemed more like a desperate mass frenzy)

It is a danger in making it too gory and lose the essence of a game. Gore should be a cherry on top, imo. If it's there all the time then it quickly get very tiresome. And it has to have a meaning with what is going on in the game. I really liked the way they did it in Silent Hill f during the ritual. It was also quite painful to watch.

Whatever this game ends up as I probably will wait until they are completely done with all the patches so I know what game I'm getting by the end. And to be sure there is no surprise rewrites (accidental or otherwise) of any characters.

In a regular playthrough of BG3 of 60-100 hours you would encounter perhaps 10 minutes of on screen smut. Out of a 1000+ hours in the game I have spent less than 1 hour watching sex or smut on the screen. I appreciate that the intimacy brings more layers to the characters and adds to their personality, but I think it generates a very disproportionate amount of discourse and most of that discourse simply boils down to that people like and enjoy different things and if you don't enjoy it, you can just say "no thanks, I'll pass".

Thats a very short sighted view.

The need for smut and "romance" has driven a lot of BG3s design.
From the companion selection that is limited to attractive people (no dwarves, other short races or dragonborn), their shallow personalities that are always willing, Halsin as a whole being made into a companion because of EA players thirsting for him with "sex" being his only personality trait to the post game support which was mire focused on adding kisses than to fix some of the glaring plot holes of the game.
And then Larian even abandoned their artistic integrity when they caved to the simps and changed the Astarion kiss scene.

So for those "10 minutes" as you call them and outsized amount if design resources were used, to the detriment of other, more important aspects of the game.

I do hope this game gives you and others what you have been craving so you can stop banging on about it.

Guys, the disgusting stuff in the trailer WAS the entire point. They even say in the beginning of the trailer: "For mature audiences only".

To everyone clutching their pearls over the smut/gore/vomit: Larian is playing you like a fiddle and it's free marketing for them and all their games, including the upcoming Divinity.

And much to my delight, I might add, bc I have played all their games since DOS, and this is how Larian is, and why I love them. Larian never talks down to their audience: they make Mature games for Mature audiences, and they will never "dumb it down" or "sanitize", or be "intellectually condescending", so please no one start acting all sanctimonious.

Besides... if you don't like the way Larian does things.... why in the name of Zeus are you even here?

The argument about resources still boils down to that "I would have wanted them to dedicate resources to stuff that I enjoy, and not stuff that other people enjoy." I am not saying that the opinions or discussions aren't valid, I am saying that for the amount of content and impact it has, there is a disproportionate amount of discourse around it, which may be the reason it has also had that impact on where the resources have been allocated as you point out. In the end, if I don't enjoy the monk class, I can just not play with a monk, same as if I don't enjoy sex with Halsin, I can just not have sex with him. In both cases, resources will have been allocated to something which I don't use, but you don't see the same level of discourse around classes or other stuff.

Except, it's not just an argument about resources.

It's an argument about how the focus on such a feature has rammifications on overall design.

- Having all companions being "Pretty" meaning there's no diversity. No depth to companions, no interesting stories to explore from a companion perspective - No dragonborn means you don't get any exposition about how this race fits into the world. No small races means no interactions with how a small race companion might react to say the Duergar or Ironhand Gnomes.

Compare this to DOS2, where you did have the Red Prince, Beast and one of the best characters in the game, Fane. These weren't made with sex appeal in mind, they were just characters from the universe who were written in. But they had depth that made them actually interesting beyond "They make me feel funny in my loins"

- This push for sex is how they assassinated Halsin. People were actually intrigued by Halsin as a character. So they wanted him as a companion in order to learn more about him. But due to this focus on sex, he was made into his entire character being about how he's a massive sex pest and nothing more.

So instead of getting an actual interesting character to explore, one who's a high ranking Druid with a strong connection to the Shadow-Cursed Lands... We get Mr Freaky the Sex Machine...

This is different to "Just don't interact with sex" and comparisons to the Monk class, because it outright changes design of the game outside of "Do you select this option?"

If you don't interact with sex, you still have to suffer from the lack of companion diversity. If you don't interact with sex, you still get saddled with a cardboard cutout in the shape of Halsin instead of an actual character.

Then of course, there's the secondary argument which is about caving to demands of players. Wyll was rewritten from someone actually interesting into the boring nothingburger with no personal impetus in his own story we got. Halsin was as mentioned assassinated when he was suddenly shifted into becoming a companion. Astarion instead of having proper consequences from the bad decision of having him ascend and how that affects his shitty personality (That people want to ignore because he's sexy) had a change to remove it.

Instead of getting to experience what the developers intended, the vision they had of the world and its story... We got garbage that was made entirely to please gooners.

These arguments aren't necessarily "Anti-sex" and advocating that sex cannot exist within the game. But rather that development and design shouldn't revolve around sex. Which harkens back to my initial comment on this thread about the developers being "Unfiltered"

Having sex and gore isn't necessarily bad. So long as it's only used as is necessary and is integrated naturally into the story.

If there is naturally occurring romance options in the game, that naturally leads to a sexual encounter, then having a depiction of the sex can exist instead of a stupid fade to black or worse, the clothed dry-humping crap from Bioware titles (Whereby they find the scene to be important enough to include, but not important enough to not treat it like an absolute joke)

Just like if there is naturally occuring scenes of gore, having it actually depicted is fine. A character like Kniles the Flenser is all about gore and he fits into the world perfectly, having his insanity properly depicted would make sense.

The issue arises when gore and sex start to dictate beyond their station. When characters start being designed because they have to be compatible with standard sexual attraction (AKA: They have to be "Pretty" both designwise and also race wise). Or if you add random BS just as an excuse for gore for gore's sake rather than it being a poignant expression of a key story moment.

With of course, being "Unfiltered" meaning that we see what the developers envisioned. Not what a subsection of players desired, whether they're gooners, prudes or splatterhouse enthusiasts. Since yes, that subsection of players might be pleased by being pandered to... But it leaves everyone else having to deal with what is essentially fanfiction.

I agree with most of your points. And was what I also tried to point out in my previous comment. Gore for gore sake, or sex for sex sake do not make good games. It doesn't mean there can be none, but it has to be intertwined so it is fun, or at least interesting to play. I think about the game Agony for instance. I have not played it, but boy it flopped.

I do think Larians decisions that aren't changed in the final game (BG3) should be taken as what they wanted. At least we can not know otherwise unless something is said from the devs themselves.

I am curious what this "unfiltered" Larian will look like. I hope they still think about the plot and player enjoyment.

The sex scene in the trailer is censored on Youtube btw. Also hope they removed the child actor before the trailer started!

Speaking of lengthy discourse...

There aren't any gooners in here asking for more slutty elf sex or freaky companions. All we have is a game trailer, we don't even know if the game will have companions or romance yet (fair to say it is an educated guess that it will). And already there are lengthy conversations directed towards audiences that enjoy different content when it comes to smut and intimacy. Maybe the whole game will be a dating sim, that would be a shame because I don't enjoy dating sims, but there's only so much conversation worth having around the fact.

I really liked what i saw in the trailer, the whole making gods out of idols and death rituals feels very much at home for Divinity.

I hope Larian only shows us these kinds of situations in the game's trailer. Being an adult doesn't mean we have to watch sex scenes every time. Brutality can be adjusted in options.

Uhh... We literally do. The OP made a thread directly asking for more gore/smut. With them saying they:



Which prominently features a woman having sex with a lizard man.