Summary
- Baldur's Gate 3 crafts lovable characters that players can fall in love with, but the question arises if it's right for all characters to be romantically available to every player.
- Dragon Age: Inquisition handled romances with more specific preferences and how it made the characters feel more real and authentic.
Before I even begin, if you saw the title of this article and clicked on it because you're homophobic, turn back now. You're not gonna have a good time here.
For the rest of us, hey, fam! Isn't Baldur's Gate 3 amazing? Larian seems to be the studio on everyone's lips when they're not using them to cast fireball or lock them together with the lips of this top-tier RPG's intriguing and, let's be honest, sexy companions. Because while battling mindflayers is great fun, what really keeps people coming back to Larian's table is its ability to craft these lovable characters and then fall in love with them. The question that keeps itching at the back of my mind, though, is if it's right for all of them to fall in love with you.
For me, consent is a big deal, and when I was first getting into BG3, I thought this game was doing it flawlessly. I've already talked at length about how Astarion, who despite seeming like a despicable scoundrel at first glance, eventually opens up into a story of a powerful overlord sapping him of his free will and forcing him to use his body for things he didn't want to do, culminating in one of the most tear-jerking and heartwarming romances I've ever seen portrayed in gaming.
It wasn't until I read through our own Jervon Perkins' account of how he hopes Dragon Age: Dreadwolf will take notes from how BG3 handles romances that I started to think about one thing that bothers me. In Baldur's Gate 3, everyone is pansexual. It doesn't matter if you're male, female, or anywhere under the non-binary umbrella, nor does it matter if you're a human, gnome, Githyanki, or three goblins in a trenchcoat (please make this last one possible); every companion you meet is a potential romantic partner.
That's an amazing thing for accessibility, don't get me wrong. The question I have with it is: does it make these wonderfully written characters feel less real? And for that, I, too, am finding myself looking to Dragon Age: Inquisition for answers.
My partner and I both jumped into this game at launch. After having the hardest time choosing between my bubbly cinnamon bun, Leliana, and my witchy woman, Morrigan, back in Origins, I was excited to see what types of relationships I'd be able to forge in the newest installment. As a little ball of chaos, Sera piqued my interest immediately, especially after she pulled me into her brilliantly masterminded plan to fight the power by stealing people's underwear. Oh, Sera, you rascal.
Yet, when I tried to steer our budding friendship in a less-platonic direction, she curtly put a stop to that right away. She's a lesbian; end of story. I appreciate her candor—like the minstrels sing, she was never an agreeable girl—and it doesn't make me love her any less, just as a friend now.
In a similar yarn, my partner, playing a female elf, absolutely swooned over Dorian. And who wouldn't? He's absolutely oozing with suave charm, pulls off overt confidence without seeming annoyingly cocky, and with that curly-cue mustache and one classy man-boob out look, he's damn fine. They flirted back and forth for a good long while, and his wit and compliments were so warm and joyful to witness. But before he let things go too far, he got serious for a moment and let this eager little elf know that he's gay, and while flirting is a lot of fun, friendship was all he had to offer. And just like with Sera and me, it was great, and his empathic honesty seemed to strengthen their bond even more than a romantic relationship could have.
After that uplifting letdown, though, my partner decided to look up what options would actually be available, and lo and behold, there was a companion out there who was exclusively romanceable by female elves! Of course, if you've been following the Dragon Age timeline at all, you realize that (Heyo! Spoilers ahead if you're not caught up!), Solas is actually the antagonist behind the events of Inquisition, and his primary motivation is to wipe all other sentient races out of existence so that the elves can be restored to their former glory as this world's original inhabitants.
And... that just wouldn't work if Bioware had played the fanservice card and let anyone with a broody bald elf kink go after him. I suppose it wouldn't have completely broken the lore to make him romantically available to male elf Inquistors as well, but he'd never allow himself to fall for a human, elf, or Qunari, or his motivation wouldn't seem real. Plus, in the real world, people have romantic and sexual preferences, and stripping those away just to play to the players' fantasies removes the realism of consent and cheapens the friendships like the ones my partner and I forged with Sera and Dorian.
What I will say BG3 does right in the romantic consent department (aside from not forcing you into the gender binary) is setting up realistic expectations for polyamory. Note that I haven't solved the 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of who can get with whom without upsetting whoever else, but it's a complicated and personalized web of consent—just like it is in our world.
Obviously there seems to be a few characters who want to be loved by only you and expect the same in return. Gale and Wyll seem to fit into this category, and you know, I think Larian kind of nailed it with them, considering ther personalities. If Karlach is your big, fiery girlfriend, she seems okay with you getting together for some ever-so-publicized bear sex with Halsin, as long as you ask permission first, and she'll be cool with it if you want to share some intimacy with one of your other Act I companions—until you've fixed her internal engine, that is. Once she's not posing the threat of burning you to a crisp, you're all hers.
These relationships and their intricacies are both so wonderfully complex, but the main lesson to be learned from them is that you can't—and shouldn't—force any type of relationship on a person that's not right for the both of you, and I love how both these games have expressed that concept. In all, I agree that Dreadwolf could take lessons from Baldur's Gate 3 in the wooing department, but it also shouldn't give up the exclusivity of relationships that have made the Dragon Age series great. After all, that's sometimes how you make the best friends.
23 years on from the release of the seminal RPG, Baldur's Gate 2, the third game in the series has been developed by Larian Studios (of Divinity: Original Sin fame). Set over 120 years after the events of the last game, Baldur's Gate 3 tasks you and your party of heroes to fight off a mind flayer invasion of Faerun, while seeking a way to remove the tadpole in your brain that's slowly turning you into the enemy...
- Developer(s)
- Larian Studios
- Publisher(s)
- Larian Studios
- Platform(s)
- PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PC, macOS
- Genre(s)
- RPG
