Not everyone at Larian was initially on board with just how horny Baldur's Gate 3 is, but director Swen Vincke insisted on handling mature themes in a similar way to a TV show.
As part of PC Gamer's roundtable discussion with RPG developers that included Vincke, the Larian boss admitted Baldur's Gate 3's most explicitly sexual content made some of the internal staff "uncomfortable."
"We try to be as true to life as we could," he said. "Internally in the studio there were some people who felt uncomfortable, and we said, it's a mature game, right? We're going to treat it like what you would see on TV. A series I refer to often was American Gods, which I thought was really well done [in how] it treated mature themes and fantasy settings."
Admittedly, it's hard to compare Baldur's Gate 3's romances to really any TV show - as far as I'm aware, there isn't a show on TV where a druid shapeshifts into a bear and hooks up with a half-elf. That said, I get what Vincke is saying. If some of the most successful TV shows of all time - take Game of Thrones for example - can get away with sex scenes that aren't just incredibly unrestrained but also downright disturbing - it's hard to point at a fantasy video game and say it's too horny.
"You can do really crazy stuff and still relate to it," Vincke said. "It was always tastefully done. I mean, the famous bear scene—it was really a squirrel that was not looking. The rest was the theater of your mind. You filled that in, we didn't do that!"
Ultimately, Baldur's Gate 3 was awarded countless accolades for its story, at the heart of which were numerous complex and deeply rewarding relationships both romantic and platonic in nature.
Baldur's Gate 3 even topped our list of the best games of 2023, which is obviously Larian's most coveted achievement.
