While most Baldur's Gate 3 players are still blissfully making their way through Larian's lavish and expansive world, others are taking it upon themselves to do the essential work of memeing its memorable cast of characters.
08.09.2023 - 18:23 / gamedeveloper.com
Spoilers for Baldur's Gate 3
"I've played porn games that were less horny than this," was my fiancée's verdict on Baldur's Gate 3 —and she meant this as a compliment. There are delectations that Baldur's Gate 3 cannot touch, of course (one has to look to titles like Ladykiller in a Bind for a particularly unsparing eroticism that finds both the joy and humor in kinky sex), but BG3 comes shockingly close for a AAA title pitched at a mass audience. It deserves its share of praise for depicting sexuality in ways that wax and wane from the amusingly sophomoric to the genuinely erotic to the delicate and tender. But more than even that, we now have a CRPG in the BioWare model that enables proper polyamory—without hacks, extremely esoteric or buggy play strategies, or mods.
The fact that your custom character can get into a polycule with Shadowheart and Halsin is more than a little notable, after all. But beyond that, there's a critique that's started to emerge about this game's portrayal of its "romance options," and it's an argument that I thought had been dead and buried since around 2012: that characters have no defined sexuality, as such, but playersexuality . That they have no identity save whatever is most congenial for the fantasy of the player, and thus diminishing of any agency or independent identity of the non-player characters.
But I'd contend that this is both untrue and that the game's portrayal of polyamory is a perfect case study in why.
I've always tried to be cautious about heaping uncritical praise on AAA titles for marginal originality while genuinely adventurous indie games often languish in penurious obscurity, of course. As I already suggested, BG3 is hardly unique in being profoundly sexy—its portrayals of kink (for instance, with a priest of Loviatar, the Goddess of Pain, consensually torturing you), its tableau of temptation (a demoness' seductions turn the Hells themselves into the strangest, most elegant sex toy, with barely any animation required), or its portrayals of touch, sex, love, and longing are not new in and of themselves. But I also want to resist the opposite tendency to not give credit where it's due.
To argue that BG3 's companions and NPCs are "playersexual" underrates the care put into their writing, when we should instead be seeing them as models to build on. To understand why, we need to go back into the past a bit and take a lengthy excursion through Thedas.
The argument about "playersexuality" was always compelling, in a certain light. It was an extension of the push to increase representation of queer sexuality in games, with an eye towards further proving it. The strongest version of the argument runs as follows:
While most Baldur's Gate 3 players are still blissfully making their way through Larian's lavish and expansive world, others are taking it upon themselves to do the essential work of memeing its memorable cast of characters.
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Typical, isn't it? You wait weeks for a big update to come along, and then two arrive at once. As previously reported, Cyberpunk 2077's game-changing 2.0 patch arrives on the 21st September — and now we learn that it'll be joined by Patch 3 for Baldur's Gate 3. As the name suggests, this will be the third major update for the RPG since its full launch, with developer Larian Studios previously promising patch parity between PC and PS5. With that in mind, we assume it'll be available on Sony's current-gen system at the same time.
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