Baldur’s Gate 3 Romance Just Isn’t Interesting – Extra Punctuation

And to the game’s credit there were plenty of chances for Mortimer to wave his astonishingly large and turgid Deception bonus, as well as opportunities to live up to his reputation for banging anything warmer than room temperature. The first such opportunity came weirdly quickly in the form of that one angry lizard lady party member. You know, the one on the box art with the pointy nose. I forget her name – which is completely in character for Mortimer – but I think she started getting warm for his form because of all the times the two of them had to violently murder their way out of a situation. Perhaps under the mistaken impression that he’d intended things to go that way. Whatever the case, their talk was getting flirty and Mortimer never says no to a nice bit o’ strange, so before long he was getting dragged from his bedroll one night to see to the missus.

Naturally I’d left adult content on because, pff, I like tits, why lie? And watching the act play out brought on a bit of a game critic moment. As I watched my protagonist semi-explicitly perform cunnilingus on a muscular lady with skin like a slightly underripe banana, I asked myself, what is actually the point of this?

Now, rest assured this isn’t coming from a place of prudishness. If anything, the sex scene wasn’t titillating enough. Video game graphics still struggle with getting two in-engine models to physically interact in a way that doesn’t come across off-putting. There’s not enough give and squishiness to the physicality. Even kissing and shaking hands looks a bit off, so a full on sex scene looks like two mannequins jostling around next to each other in the back of a speeding truck. I think it’s only the Witcher 3 I’ve seen manage to bring it off. I mean, pull it off. I mean, oh forget it, move on.

I assume some amount of titillation was intended because when the pointy lady first got her kit off the camera does a slightly pervy track up her body, yeah, sorry Matt, you’re probably gonna have to pixelate a lot of this. But there was no use framing it like it was a big reveal, I’d already seen all my party members naked by unequipping their gear out of impish curiosity. Not that that was very titillating, either, ‘cos it was a completely non-sexual context. It’d be like getting turned on by seeing a vagina in a gynaeocologist’s office.

Recent high level western RPGs like Baldurs Gate 3 and Cyberpunk have taken a rather unflinching approach to nudity. “Yes,” the character creation page seems to say. “Here’s your character’s giggle zone. We’re all grown ups here, everyone’s got one, it’s nothing silly, it’s part of the human condition. Now, how many inches do you want?” I can’t imagine it ever mattering, game, but I suppose I would’ve said the same about micro managing eyebrow distance, so fine, seventeen. You have completely spoiled the mystique, though, so don’t expect me to be impressed when you whip it out later in a sex scene all coyly framed and moodily lit.

No, obviously sex in these games serves a purpose beyond porn. If you want porn, just search online. I hear there’s some very industrious fellows who know how to extract game models and do some jolly creative things with them in Blender. And then you don’t have to play through hours and hours of an RPG selecting the right dialog options to see it. The other purpose that a sex scene serves beyond letting us get our nasty little rocks off is to pay off a developing relationship between characters that we’re invested in.

Much as the sex scene in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time does, as discussed in my previous video on the subject. But that didn’t apply, here. Old lizardy-chops had jumped fairly rapidly from angry contempt to wanting to be a sexhaver. Maybe that was the point, she’s from a race that flirts by threatening to cut each other’s goolies off, but still, when I was watching the knobbing scene, I didn’t feel any sense of satisfaction from a character arc getting paid off. I mostly felt a sense of proxy embarrassment for everyone involved.

Even back when the flirty dialogue had started, something hadn’t felt right. When you make camp and you chinwag with your party members around the fire while they’re dressed in their pyjamas, the flirtation always seemed to be happening with this unspoken vibe of inevitability. Like it was a given that I was prowling around for some action. And that led me to wonder if letting us knob our party members in western RPGs is something being included more for the sake of tradition than because it’s actually justified?

I suppose this is another thing we can blame on Bioware. I wanna say it was Mass Effect that first won itself some headlines by including full on sex scenes with party members, and its stablemate Dragon Age of course, and now it almost feels like knobbing the party members is now expected in certain kinds of RPGs. Yes, the Witcher did it as well, but that was always justified as part of Geralt’s personality, i.e., a lonely, horny git. It’s party member shagging combined with blank slate protagonist that doesn’t work for me. I can’t get invested in a romance if I know one participant could’ve been replaced by literally anyone else as long as they took the right dialog options. I discussed that in my previous video on romance, too, sort of takes something away from the shaggable characters to know that they don’t really have any preferences of their own. That they’ll always be physically attracted and down to clown with you no matter how much time you spent in the character creator making yourself look like Pete Postlethwaite with a hunchback.

That’s the other thing, it feels reductive that the only way to express that you’re in good with the character is to let you shag them. There’s another party member in Baldur’s Gate 3, the wizard bloke, and one of his campfire friendship building scenes involves having a bit of a magic mind meld. And the game invites you to project a mental image to him to convey your intentions. But I’m pretty sure the only options it gives you are “picture yourself kissing him full on the mouth” or “picture yourself kicking him in the nuts.” And I was like, couldn’t I just imagine the two of us having a nice drink and a chat? Surely the full scope of human relationships has more of a spectrum than shag or hate. I’m perfectly capable of liking, respecting, being interested in, wanting to hang out with, even loving people I have no interest in shagging.

“So don’t shag them, Yahtz.” What’s that, Mr. Socky? “It’s called a role playing game for a reason. You could always just not take the shag option if you don’t think it would be in character. I’m pretty sure there were, like, nine opportunities in the runup to shagging the lizard lady where Mortimer could take the dialog option where he suddenly comes over all coy and slams on the brakes. And throughout the game there’re plenty of ways to express esteem for a character without also implying you want to jiggle their naughties. If you want, you could play through Baldur’s Gate 3 as a prudish little schoolmarm who flinches at the very mention of naughty oscillation.”

See, this is the thing, Mr. Socky, I’m not sure you can. It’s the dialog trees. Dialog options convey things about a character even when they don’t actually say them. I always liked how Lucasarts adventure games would use dialog trees to make the protagonist come across as scatterbrained and indecisive for a gag. Like you’d click on the option to say something brave and defiant in the face of danger, but the character would only make some frightened squeaking noises because they chickened out at the last moment. And taking the “I think we should just be friends” option is kinda tainted when just under it you can clearly see the option to say “Bite down on this wooden spoon, baby, I’m coming in dry.” Because even if I don’t say it, I know it at least crossed my mind to say it. So no matter how I try to play them, the protagonists of these games always come across like massive horndogs.

I suppose that gets to the bottom of why the romance in games like Baldur’s Gate 3 just isn’t clicking the pilot light for me, anymore. Maybe it works for some people and I shouldn’t grouse about something that is after all just a bit of non-essential fun on the side, but I generally take the stance that it’s valid to criticise optional content because work had to go into it that could’ve been spent on something else. There’s a sequence in Mass Effect Andromeda where, through an exhaustively circuitous series of fetch quests, you can organize a team building movie night with your party members. And you know what, that scene with the lot of them just bullshitting on a couch did a hell of a lot more to make me engage with them as characters than any of their individual knobbing sessions.

Goes to show there’s a lot more interesting things you can do with characters when you’re not just treating them like sex fruit machines that eventually dispense a knobbing scene if you keep pulling the right levers. Use your imagination. Maybe the relationship track could culminate with a scene where the two of us go to the bank to take out a joint business loan. Or to the housewares shop to buy more wooden spoons.