A Late-Adopter's Guide to Baldur's Gate 3 - Part 2

On flawed approaches to romance and sex.

Part 1

Spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3.

Credit to I like Detectives for the thumbnail image.

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In Part 1, I looked at some of the barriers which can hinder new players from getting the most out of Baldur’s Gate 3, the biggest roleplaying game of the 2020s, from the perspective of a player that gradually fell in love with the game.

Here, I will continue that analysis, focusing particularly on the game’s sometimes clumsy approach to romance.

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Barrier 3: The ‘romance first’ approach

Something else that I found a bit off-putting on my first playthrough (and griped about in notes) is the game’s heavy emphasis on romance and sex, which is very on the nose in Act 1. In my note, I took a fairly harsh position - I suggested that these interactions were pretty much written with TikTok in mind, as a viral marketing strategy, and therefore were not required to make sense in context.

I do still feel that way about certain parts of the game, which I largely avoid and pretend aren’t canon, for the sake of my own enjoyment and peace of mind. We all know about the notorious bear sex scene, and of course the ‘Mind Blown’ achievement¹, not to mention some other moments that left me a bit uncomfortable².

I have since revised my opinion, my attitude having softened as I got more familiar with the game and its characters, but I do still think there are issues with BG3’s emphasis on romance and sex in the opening act. My thoughts are as follows:

1. The pitfalls of universal dateability

The fact that all of the origin companions must be universally dateable is limiting, and can feel odd compared to other RPGs. The vast majority of RPGs have a variety of companions of various ages and backgrounds, some of whom may be romanceable whereas others aren’t. Many of my favourite RPG characters of all time aren’t romanceable³, whether because they’re older, unavailable, just not that into you, or all of the above. Meanwhile, BG3’s origin companions, ostensibly a random selection of illithid-abductees, all happen to be gorgeous, single, pansexual 20 to 30-somethings⁴ who would look more at home in a dating sim than a camp in the wilderness, and are all potentially feral for the player, no matter how gross-looking your avatar may be⁵. It’s odd.

The similarity of these characters in terms of age and stage also carries into their storylines, as almost all of them are struggling to be independent of an abusive quasi-parental authority and moving away from the values they were raised with. To be fair, the game does develop these themes very well in most cases, and there is some variation, the characters being sorted into complimentary pairs of foils (Shadowheart and Lae’zel, Wyll and Karlach, Astarion and Gale). But the basic similarities are hard to overlook, and we only get some older/unavailable companions much later in the game (Jaheira and Minsc).

In short, I’d prefer a more diverse group, and part of diversity is that not everyone is hot and/or DTF all the time. Again, marketing is probably a big part of this - viral clips of Shadowheart and Astarion alone have probably sold more copies of BG3 than Dragon Age: The Veilguard sold total.

2. Priority on romance

It’s fairly clear that a number of characters have been written with the romance option as the priority, and this can introduce some problems when not taking the romance route. This is most apparent with the two most popular romance options - Shadowheart and Astarion.

Shadowheart 100% reads as having been written with the assumption that most male players (i.e. most players) would romance her, which of course they did, because look at her. Therefore, any friendship with Shadowheart is written with very strong romantic overtones - from about three hours into the game, with even a little approval, she will tell the player that she has never met anyone like them and feels a special connection with them, and soon after confides in them about her traumatic memories. As such, on my first playthrough, in which I didn’t romance Shadowheart, I had a hard time connecting with the character until very late in the game, because this deep bond that we allegedly had did not feel authentic or earned, but rather artificial and pandering. On my second playthrough, I did romance Shadowheart, which felt much better, and I think it felt better largely because it is pretty much the intended experience⁶. She feels like she has been written as a love interest first and a friend second.

Shadowheart with her mentally well hair. Source.

Astarion, meanwhile, who is most popular with the girls and the gays, has a different issue, but with similar roots - whereas Shadowheart is (ironically) an open book requiring very little encouragement to gain her confidence, Astarion is extremely difficult to bond with unless you a) romance him and b) cater to him at all times, including letting him drink your blood and make creepy comments about tasting other companions’ blood (he is a vampire, if it wasn’t obvious). My view is that this is at least partly because he was written with his romance storyline foremost in mind. Part of that romance is (on paper) about Astarion and/or the player learning about consent, although given how difficult it is to set boundaries with him early on without losing his approval⁷, I have to wonder how effectively this was done. He sets boundaries with you, but it’s not so easy for you to set boundaries with him, short of staking him in the heart, which to be fair sends a pretty strong if final message⁸.

In any case, a big part of Astarion’s character is based on the fact that he has extensive sexual trauma, which you can learn about in any playthrough⁹, but this aspect of his character is only fully explored in the romance route, and even then not until long after you jump into bed with him in Act 1, when you hardly know him, and what you do know is bad. He says it himself in his good ending: ‘You trusted me even when that was an objectively stupid thing to do.’

Without the missable and romance-specific context, he is pretty much just a dick - he hates altruism, will gladly murder refugees at the drop of a hat, may murder a vampire hunter in cold blood¹⁰, and later goes on to commit mass murder in a truly satanic way if you let him. He is so notoriously hard to get along with in Act 1 that many players have resorted to leaving him 30+ feet away from the party during any conversation with an NPC, because Astarion will invariably want you to take the most antisocial option in every interaction, no matter how little it benefits the party. He’s also quite bad at being a manipulative seducer, because he can’t help but drop his red flags everywhere, and is easily seen through (probably one of the lowest insight checks in the game).

I am very tempted to describe Astarion in terms of the standard YA/romantasy male love interest, who at this point is basically just a guy who might murder a woman in real life. There’s eventually more to Astarion, yet he’s on that spectrum, and this aspect of him is clearly what many of his fans are interested in.

My hot take is that he’s only tolerable if you want to sleep with him, which I don’t.

He WAS being a dick, to be fair.

3. The party scene and early rush to define relationships

One scene that I found particularly weird on my first playthrough was the party before leaving the starting area in Act 1. In this scene, many love affairs can potentially begin, therefore multiple members of the party (potentially all of them!) will either directly hit on you or heavily hint. These conversations will all be pretty much back to back, therefore it’s a very jarring series of interactions, that comes across strangely, to say the least.

The presentation here is just not great: it feels shallow and pandering, even though none of these interactions are terrible in isolation. You are made very aware of the guard rails pushing you to define each relationship in turn in one of two ways (friend or lover), rather than seeing them develop at a more natural pace.

Also, it’s very early doors and you might have hardly spoken to some of these characters, and as such it can come across badly when someone you literally haven’t spoken to since recruitment is suddenly propositioning you.

My paladin at the party.

What you are signing up for also varies dramatically from one character to the next. Lae’zel and Astarion are all over you as early as Act 1, meanwhile Shadowheart will share a kiss with you under the stars followed by a long, slow courtship with a lot more emphasis on emotions than sex.

4. Take the hint, Gale

Another issue that I (and every other player in existence, except the minority that actually wanted to sleep with him) had came partly from this scene on my first playthrough - the wizard (/rizzard) Gale of Waterdeep, or as I call him ‘fucking Gale’, became convinced that my character was in a relationship with him.

This stemmed from a) carelessly being a bit too nice to him in the party scene, and b) an earlier scene in which he attempts to rizz you up with a magic lesson in an Ao3 ‘teacher and student’ dynamic bit, which invariably has a romantic overtone no matter what dialogue options you pick¹¹. So, this triggered many party banters referencing the intimate relationship I didn’t have with Gale, and also Gale wistfully bringing it up for literally the entire rest of the game, even including the epilogue reunion scene. It did not help that one of Gale’s later scenes is also written with heavily romantic overtones no matter what, as he invites you to spend the evening with him under the stars¹² and implies that you are ‘lovers.’

Gale still persisted in bringing up our previous non-relationship despite being harshly rejected in this scene; character no. 2 rejected him earlier and even more harshly¹³, yet still got the ‘lovers’ line. I don’t know if any other characters can behave like this, though if so I haven’t seen it, whereas I have now seen it twice with Gale, who remains excessively keen regardless of how many times you reject him. Even Lae’zel (who has some grim pick-up lines) gets that no means no, and on Playthrough 2 acknowledged my previous rejection once in the party scene, then never brought it up again.

I could go on, but the long and the short of it is that this game’s presentation of romance, sex and relationships is not always great. There are some worthwhile emotional moments in particular routes, and many of the companion characters are certainly loveable, but the setup in Act 1 is clumsy, and that can be a barrier to enjoying this world and these characters.

Barrier 4: Interface and inventory

This is a more basic item, requiring less litigation, and probably applies more to the console experience than the PC. BG3 is a very intricate game, with a huge amount of freedom in terms of how you can interact with the world and use your abilities to get around and overcome challenges. An intricate game requires an intricate interface - really, a mouse and keyboard is probably a lot more optimal for a game like this than a console’s controller. It took me a long time to get used to the various menus and radials that you have to master to actually play.

This basic mechanical difficulty, combined with the overload of choices, branching paths, dialogues, and levelling-related decision fatigue all conspired to leave me quite overwhelmed through the game’s opening, which is probably why I got so little out of Act 1 on my first playthrough. Eventually, experience and muscle memory make it second nature, at which point more of your brain’s RAM becomes available to engage with the actual substance of the game, and it is definitely worth pushing through to get there.

Also, inventory management is not great. I think that Larian did their best with it, and there are a number of convenient features¹⁴, but on console at least there is no search function, which can make it very tedious to find specific items in the swamp of possessions on your person. Low strength characters also suffer, being able to carry less stuff, which means more time lost shuffling things around.

Closing thoughts

To re-iterate, BG3 is entirely worth your time, being the biggest, most ambitious, and most advanced RPG on the market right now, and likely to remain that way for many years yet. There are so many positives that I haven’t written about, but here it’s sufficient to say that the game is beautiful, masterfully designed, and almost every detail screams quality and dilligence. It feels as if Larian’s artists, writers, designers, animators and actors really took pride in their work, which may be a naive thing to say in the context of crunch culture etc., but nonetheless the difference between this and (for example) Bioware’s latest offering is night and day, and seems to speak of a better culture and ethos.

The game does have a few shortcomings, though many were inevitable results of well-justified tradeoffs. The (relatively) weak combat in the opening chapters was an unavoidable result of sticking faithfully to the D&D system, and to the developers’ credit they did go out of their way to provide the player with many options, alternative solutions, and ways to tip the odds in their favour. There’s also the issue of levelling and optimising your characters, which can be tiresome, but eventually pays off in the later game, at which point characters are powerful enough and versatile enough for the challenging fights to be a pleasure rather than a chore. The setting requires a lot of exposition and a lot of proper nouns, but again, it eventually pays off in numerous great storylines that are all cleverly interwoven.

To get the most out of BG3, it’s wise to take your time, explore carefully, and talk to NPCs whenever you get the opportunity. You will often be amazed by new details and unique creatures and set-pieces, making exploration highly rewarding in comparison to most games, and there’s also a lot of replay value in finding different solutions to problems and exploring alternative outcomes to situations.

The game also suffers somewhat from its approach to romance and sex, which is not always as good as it could be. Some characters are written with too much emphasis on the possibility of romance, others are difficult to connect with without romance, still others will not take a hint. The approach can feel pandering and too obviously artificial, in a way that reminds you that you’re playing a game, and makes the wish fulfilment aspect of RPGs far too obvious.

1. Context - you can bang the druid Halsin in bear form, this was basically a meme that went extremely viral; you can also bang the Emperor, a literal tentacle monster, in a painfully detailed and intricately narrated animated scene. BG3 went quite far with the weird shit, and I do think that viral marketing was a big factor.

2. (the Drow twins, the incubus, Halsin sliding into your DMs unprompted…)

3. Kreia from KOTOR 2, Sten and Vivienne from Dragon Age, Pasqal from Rogue Trader…

4. Okay, Astarion’s over 200, but in human terms he’s the equivalent of a 25 year old with no prospects and naught but an OnlyFans account to his name. Same with Shadowheart, a half-elf who is apparently 40 but you would not think it, she herself has no idea how old she is due to magically induced memory loss, and like Astarion her socio-economic prospects aren’t great (her options are to stay in a cult or get murdered).

5. To be fair, they do kind of prompt you to make your character hot, insofar as all the default presets and origin characters are hot, so clearly it’s the sort of game where it’s optimal to be hot, and sub-optimal to be a gremlin.

6. Also helps hugely if you are playing a resisting Dark Urge; there’s a key scene that really made the romance for me, without which it would have been lacking something. Durge > Tav.

7. (which is an uphill battle to gain, since he disapproves of any quest that involves helping people, which is most quests)

8. And I appreciate Larian for letting you do this - it’s a realistic reaction for a character in the circumstances, and this option is one of many that signals the studio’s praiseworthy commitment to giving the player freedom to define their own experience. Larian won’t force you to have a character who annoys you or creeps you out in your party, no matter how much of a fan favourite he may be or how hard they worked on his personal quest.

9. There’s an easily missable but very important interaction in Act 2, in which he is clearly very uncomfortable about being asked to bite a pervy Drow woman, and initially refuses but can be talked into it. If you support his refusal, he will begin to like and trust you much more, whereas if you pressure him into doing it he will reluctantly go through with it but be angry at you later. It’s a great series of interactions and a potential turning point in Astarion’s relationship with the player, romanced or not.

10. Astarion’s master, a symbolic/literal rapist and mass murderer who makes Count Orlok look like a kitten, abducted the guy’s kids with Astarion’s help. There is no version of this situation in which the vampire hunter was in the wrong. Astarion girlies are insane for murdering this man.

11. Per Playthrough 2, he disapproves if you turn his magic rizz lesson down…

12. (Who does he think he is? Shadowheart?)

13. (so harshly I actually felt bad in real life for hurting the pixel man’s feelings)

14. Food automatically going into supply bags if available, being able to transfer items to any companion or to storage at any time…