fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #7001 ]

[ SECRET POST #7001 ]

⌈ Secret Post #7001 ⌋

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so I restarted Baldur's Gate 3 recently after playing it some years ago but never finishing

and the way that companions and romances are written is hugely off-putting to me. I HATE that the path to a relationship has to be 'hook up/fuck them in Act 1 BEFORE any actual backstory or character building happens, THEN you actually date or get to know them in Act 2'.

it's so incredibly awkward I cannot stand it. I'm fine with SOME characters doing this as part of character writing (that makes sense! different people place different value or importance on fucking, sex should be nbd to some people and a huge thing for others), but to have LITERALLY EVERY COMPANION, people who are SUPPOSEDLY from different backgrounds and cultures (including literal space aliens) find my extremely milquetoast character hugely fuckable within like days of meeting them is just a total immersion breaker.

I actually think worse of people who like this as a roleplaying game or think the character writing is good.

Which companions do you mean? Because outside of Lae'zel(who makes sense given her culture) and Astarion(and his has nuance to it if you do fuck him) you don't actually have sex with most of the companions until well into act 2 and 3, you actually do get to know them before that point. Like you get to kiss them sure but no actual sex happens for most of them in act 1.

It's more the 'everyone is hitting on you Very Sexily and Sexy Attraction Happens First' aspect, Gale commenting on your musk and trying to put the moves on you, Halsin being like 'he sure wouldn't mind being had', Minthara VERY CLEARLY wanting to be MORE THAN A FRIEND, Shadowheart asking for a drink and actually meaning A Kiss, like literally everything is in the Sexytime Category and finding your character sexy, regardless of whether you WANT your character to be perceived as sexy or not, even if you make your character the most unsexy possible.

Makes sense since kissing and sex are the same exact thing /s

Flirting is not equivalent to sex though? Like I can understand not wanting to do a romance route or what have you, but having NPC's flirt with the PC is nothing unusual in games like this so this comes off more a subjective issue, which is fair, than a problem of the game itself. Even the flirting levels are different, some flirt harder and some are gentler about it, but you can reject the NPC's at any point and you're not 'locked in' until act 2.

DA but that is not what I thought OP was saying. It isn't that they think heavy flirting = sex, it is that there is no build up of a relationship, everyone is just immediately attracted to you and hitting on you hard. Sounds like OP wants more of a variety of relationship building and attraction/flirting types.

But I'm not OP so I could be wrong.

DA but that's also how I read it. They didn't say the characters "are fucking my character" they said the characters "find my character hugely fuckable" which isn't the same thing

You can be anything you want and play any character you want and if you want to play a 70 year old that just wants to be the Team Dad, every single character now has an age gap daddy kink out of nowhere.

Yeah, it gets weird.

So, I refuse generally to play romance games disguised as rpgs, and I don't D&D, but I have played BG3 because the overall gameplay mechanics were enjoyable. And I will 100% give you Gale and Halsin because holy fucking shit calm down especially since you can't even fuck Halsin till Act 3 but he's so damn horny on main.

But, OP, please tell me you know it's a mechanic. You know it's not about your Tav creation, it's a programmed response to your positive/negative reaction balance for all of your IC choices, right? You know you can be a goody-goody and get Wil's approval 20 times which triggers the automatic "now let's kiss" response? You can be evil as shit 20 times and now Asatarion is into you? You can be sarcastic in 20 situations and now everybody's eyeballing you?

I get it, it's shit that this was baked into the development and mechanics, and unfortunately Gale was bugged for so long that no matter how many times you chose the "not interested in romance" response he still somehow gave you romance responses, I'm told it was fixed but I have yet to see it. I refused to play Dragon Age because it was so cleary dating-sim-disguised-as-rpg according to everyone on the internet. I pushed through and forced nothing but platonic relationships with all the companions, and once you're not trying to deliberately game pos/neg (to be fair you have to keep from dropping into neg or characters will leave you forever and Astarion is too broken in combat to lose) you'll be able to just be friends with everyone as you wish. Just fucking turn 'em down, they'll live and they won't actually leave your party unless you make them actually angry.

I'm pretty sure OP is aware it's a game mechanic. But having to stick to a mechanical system can still make character writing force itself to fit and end up worse and more unnatural than it could have been. Being able to ignore the awkward parts doesn't make that writing good or better, it makes it ignorable lol

OH and Karlach too, very telegraphing BOY SHE SURE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE SOMEONE TO HOLD AND MAYBE MORE, NUDGE NUDGE, but she I actually mind the least because she just comes off as impersonally generally horny about it, rather than horny for my character in particular. It's still sort of massively offputting regardless, though.

I mean you've answered your own question: most people playing RPG's like this do not consider their playable character to be a mid, boring as fuck person, they're going to think they're interesting and worth romancing. Which is very normal for these kinds of RPG's.

You do you if you go with the idea of your own character being an unfuckable bore, but very few of these games are going to consider that in their narrative.

Not only that, but the impression I always get in these types of games is that the attraction is more based on their personality than their appearance, which makes sense given that you can make your character look however you want.

There's a wide spectrum between 'boring as fuck and unfuckable' and 'hot and interesting enough to flirt with practically at first meeting'. It seems lax of a 'role playing game' to ignore that everything but the latter exists? What if you want to play a generic normal person who has no business being a hero?

I'd expect it of a 'romance game' but that's a different genre.

'What if I don't want to do what the genre of the game is based around'

Fucking weird as hell take but okay.

...? DA2's literal story was about an MC who didn't want to be a hero/ine but was forced to be one. What if you want to play that type of character? Seems fitting for the genre to me.

I should note I'm not OP. Only pointing out not everyone wants to play a hot sexy hero, the game gives you the option to not play a hot sexy hero, but everyone reacts to you like you're a hot sexy hero anyway... so there is kind of a point being made.

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[ SECRET POST #7001 ]

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