Baldur's Gate III's romance scenes made some Larian developers feel uncomfortable

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Baldur's Gate III gives players a lot of options in how they want to interact with the NPCs around them, and like any character-focused RPG, of course you can romance a lot of them, too. From a tentacled mind-flayer to a man in the form of a bear, Larian really lets you go wild.

Speaking at a PC Gamer roundtable, Larian CEO Swen Vincke spoke about the effect those scenes had on the developers. "Internally in the studio there were some people who felt uncomfortable," he said. "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. You can do really crazy stuff and still relate to it. It was always tastefully done."

"I mean, the famous bear scene—it was really a squirrel that was not looking. The rest was the theatre of your mind. You filled that in, we didn't do that!"

In fairness to Baldur's Gate III, for all the flack it gets for being graphic, a lot of the romance scenes often cut away to black before things can get really steamy. There are some outliers, but otherwise it does feel like it has a more mature television approach to its romance scenes.