Recently Larian Studios—the developers behind the beloved Divinity: Original Sin games tasked with the daunting prospect of continuing the legacy of the Baldur’s Gate series, some of the most iconic Dungeons & Dragons games ever made—made a big fuss about the scope of its game. More dialogue than Lord of the Rings! Cutscenes longer than Game of Thrones! I care not for these things. I care for literally wild sex with handsome druids.
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Thankfully, today’s “Panel From Hell” livestream by Larian, offering a look at the game before it releases after an extensive Early Access period early next month, confirmed that players will be able to get exactly that. Taking a closer look at several romance scenes that players will be able to experience with Baldur’s Gate 3‘s cast of characters, Larian demoed two encounters on pretty much the opposite ends of the raunchiness spectrum. The first saw a Dragonborn player character—one of the 11 options from Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, the system that drives BG3‘s mechanics, available—go on a date in the titular Sword Coast city with Karlach Demonsbane, a female Tiefling Barbarian, wining and dining them in a cute little restaurant scene.
The other meanwhile, saw one of the playable party members gamers can pick instead of a custom character, Astarion (a High Elf Vampire), escape the city for a nighttime forest encounter with the party member Halsin, a Wood Elf druid. Much to the delight of the watching live audience, the scene quickly saw both men undress for a moment of intimacy… before, while being overcome with lust, Halsin lost control of his druidic abilties and briefly wildshaped into a bear.
Being a Dungeons & Dragons game, and therefore being about letting you make any choice you want, the scene could’ve played out multiple ways—the player can back out, scared off by Halsin’s lack of control; they can comfort him and continue their romantic encounter; or they can… ask him to turn back into a bear. What do you think the audience picked? “Have you ever considered the joys and pleasures of sexual congress with a wildshaped Druid?” Adam Smith, a lead writer on Baldur’s Gate 3, said in a statement sent via press release. “Because at Larian, we have, and ultimately landed on the side of giving the people what they want: tender, consensual romance with a man temporarily transformed into a grizzly bear.”
Yeah. Although the stream cut away from anything too raunchy, that’s exactly what will happen if you play your cards right. And ridiculous salaciousness aside, this a far more interesting factoid about Baldur’s Gate 3 than the vastness of its script or the length of its cutscenes rivalling other mainstream fantasy epics. As someone already very impressed with the version of the game that has developed throughout Early Access, I am coming to Baldur’s Gate 3 for a virtual Dungeons & Dragons experience: a sense of freedom and player influence, a playground for amazing and absurd stories to play out, upended by an out-there combat choice or a tight dice roll dialogue check. The best part of playing a tabletop RPG is the potential of all those things intersecting—a gung-ho player and storyteller, a mechanical playbox, and the luck of the dice—and giving you a memorable story to tell your friends after the fact, a thing that could’ve only happened to you and your character in that moment.
Sometimes that thing might be getting it on with a bear who is also actually a bear sometimes. And the fact that that’s in there somewhere in Baldur’s Gate 3‘s over 170 hours of cutscenes is far more intriguing to me than the fact that that’s longer than every season of Game of Thrones twice over.
Baldur’s Gate 3 will release on PC August 3, ahead of a release on PlayStation 5 September 6.
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