Baldur’s Gate 3 will defy everyone’s wishes, make characters less horny

The companions in Baldur’s Gate 3 have redefined the term “player-sexual,” or the idea that a character’s romantic and sexual orientation are firmly and solely fixed on the player. Usually, in a game that allows you to romance other characters, it takes a moment for the sparks to really start flying. There’s a general buildup of flirtations before you get to have a romantic interlude with your chosen somewhere around a game’s climax. (See what I did there?)

In Baldur’s Gate 3, there is so little time between the initial “I like you” and visiting Boning’s Gate that a whole speedrun category has been developed around getting to a sex scene as quickly as possible, with the world record currently sitting at two minutes and four seconds. Turns out, your companions aren’t really that into you. In an interview with TheGamer, BG3’s game director, Swen Vincke, says that a bug was to blame for all the sexy shenanigans.

“The approval thresholds were too low when we shipped,” Vincke said to TheGamer. “That’s why they were so horny in the beginning. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. We’ve fixed it since, at least for some of them. We’re still fixing a few of them.”

According to Vincke, Gale was most affected by the bug. Personally, I didn’t think of our little moment weaving spells together as romantic. I thought it was a very intimate and emotional interlude while also being platonic with the possibility of blooming into something more. It’s rare that a game gives you an intimate moment with a character that’s not tied to sex. I thought Gale sharing his deep love of magic to be a great moment where I better understood him as a character. That this encounter with him early on in the game was possibly the result of a bug makes me kind of sad, as it informed how I responded to him later in the game and could do the same for other players.

Ironically, like Gale’s moment, I didn’t find Lae’zel’s “I wanna taste you” come-on too forward, either. Though “I wanna taste you” came early in Act 1 and is possibly the least sexy thing I could hear out of the blue, it came at an appropriate moment. Lae’zel makes much of her githyanki heritage and how they value strong warriors. I guess she saw that in me because she propositioned me right after I talked my way out of a fight with the githyanki raiding party. It’s on brand for Lae’zel to be open and forward and to dispense with things like courtship, so I didn’t much mind her proposition. It was just another neat character moment that I hope doesn’t get missed with this bug fix.

That said, the party’s big sweetheart Wyll was actually the one I found the thirstiest. You’re asking me to dance with no music, and all this time, I’ve seen you waltzing about the camp you were practicing for me? That was too much for me.

But what was too much for me isn’t for other players who are upset that Larian Studios is turning down the heat.

It’s funny that Halsin was the character used in Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s report on this, considering the series of increasingly difficult hoops you have to jump through to romance him. You have to rescue him from the goblin camp, then solve the problem of the Druid’s Grove amicably. In Act 2, there’s a harrowing-ass fight you have to endure to protect him, and even then, after saving the Shadow Lands, ending its curse, and confirming that I liked him, I had to wait several long rests before we finally made our relationship official. If some characters are having their horniness turned down, Halsin could stand to have his turned up a bit.