My poking around in Baldur's Gate 3 has made me wonder a bit about just how horny is everybody out there. I mean, I get it that you're young and whatnot, but more than once I've watched a cutscene in an MMO or RPG and thought "Just how much of this is wish fulfillment?"
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| No, it wasn't a fluke, Kira. Wait just a minute; you could have said something, you know... |
Thankfully I began playing BG3 after there was a hotfix to get some of the NPCs to, uh, not get so horny for you so quickly, to which I thought "Holy crap, it was even faster earlier??!!!"
I'm going to have to go in the direction of assuming that a lot of these romances and whatnot are primarily wish fulfillment and they just get hornier quicker. And that I wasn't hanging out with an extremely slow moving and prudish crowd in my teenage/college years.
Still, RPGs and MMOs do now have their share of very thirsty NPCs these days to match the horny PCs. So in honor of all this thirstiness in the genres, here's a selection of memes on the topic...
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| You know, the Paladin doesn't have to be the thirsty one... From dndmemes. |
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| Yeah, that escalated quickly. From animalnouncomics. |
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| Well, if you ever wondered where dragonkin really came from... From demotivational (I think). |
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| Well, that certainly explains Elminster's interest in... things. No, not in BG3 specifically (yet), but due to reputation, courtesy of Ed Greenwood's copious novels about the Forgotten Realms. From imgflip. |
And one bonus meme for the perpetually thirsty:
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| You see, Moss' description was the perception of what RPGs were to the people who didn't play. Trying to convince some DMs to actually not inject tons of sex into their campaigns is the challenge I've experienced. From Cheezburger and The IT Crowd. |
Not sure I should publicly admit that BG3 is the one game I refunded in 2023 :P
ReplyDeleteI'm sure you're not the first, and won't be the last, Syl. As much as I can see BG3 continuing the Baldur's Gate tradition, there are parts of the game that make me raise my eyebrows in disbelief. Such as the backstories of the characters; those were the sort of backstories that if I were DM I'd tell the PCs to "come back with something more realistic".
DeleteThe funny thing is, I know for a fact that my son does not go in for romance in his video games, unless something drastically has changed in the past few years. When he played through Fire Emblem: Three Houses on the Switch, I never even knew there were romance options in the game based on the way he played it. It was only when I mentioned Three Houses to some of my fellow raiders back in early TBC Classic did I discover that the game's reputation was that of a dating sim first and an RPG second.
That being said, every tabletop group has their own boundaries and limitations, and those need to be reset periodically to make sure everybody is still onboard. I'm not big on romance in my tabletop games, but others are. And still others want a straight on romance novel style RPG experience.
Besides the obvious "sex sells", I wonder how much of the thirst is due to Bioware's romances? There's a vocal subset of their players who wear the badge "will bang all the NPCs" with quite vocally. Then again, Larian is a European company so there's a cultural difference there, too.
ReplyDeleteI haven't tried BG3 as I haven't been a fan of Larian's Divine Divinity series. I didn't get into BG1 or 2, either, but I did really enjoy Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2. Maybe I should expand my RPG horizons...
Given that BioWare pretty much hung their collective hat on romance in RPGs with Baldur's Gate 2 (and it's admittedly tame text based conversations), you're not too far off the mark, I believe. BioWare having failed badly in Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem left the door open to have another company swoop in and take their title from them, and Larian pretty much ran with it. The thing is, I certainly didn't see it coming, as I played about half of Divinity: Original Sin 1 and there wasn't a single whiff of romance in it. Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity 1 and Tyranny both don't have romance either, but boy howdy does horniness exist in The Witcher games.
DeleteSo... Maybe it's a bit of both CD Projekt Red and BioWare both collectively priming the pump a bit for games such as Baldur's Gate 3 reaping the rewards of injecting romance, so to speak.