Well, that was all quite ignorant. Baldur's Gate 3 has a rating, and it's rated M. Guess what else is rated M, and sold in stores: Cyberpunk 2077. Let's look at the description there: "The game contains nudity and sexual material: Players can select a gender and customize their character; customization can include depictions of breasts, buttocks, and genitalia, as well as various sizes and combinations of genitals."

You want to go on being objectively wrong, or are you done now?

Oh really, so I assume you are equally vocal about protesting games like Dungeon Keeper where the whole point is to kill all the good guys, or games like Postal where you can go around and kill all the citizens if you want, or the GTA games where you can do all sorts of illegal stuff? Or are you a massive hypocrite?

How does that contradict anything pds41 says? To me it seems like the argument they are trying to make is that if you actually ever see those genitalia "in action" (i.e. not just the character creation screen), then the game will get an adult only rating.. and if genitalia only shows up in character creation, I would agree with pds41 that it is rather pointless. Cyberpunk 2077 could've gone to places with it but in the end it's just a pointless gimmick (and a lot of people were rightfully disappointed to find out the "depth" of that aspect of the game).

In 5 pages of posts from both sides of this debate, you're the only one hitting on the real point with this right here. It's the truth that the people putting forward a view hope people don't realize, and most often it isn't. And before anyone decides to go into attack mode, this can, and is, done with any "controversial" subject matter/topic/social issue/etc. in any consumable product of any kind by the ones creating it from any viewpoint.

FR and BG are brands that have existed and been written and portrayed a certain way for decades. Comics, tv shows, and movies are further examples of this in play. The creators of these games, shows, movies, books, products are purposely not creating something new and distinctive, and very much prefer to take an existing brand, character, story to incorporate their agenda into. The question of why is very simple - creating something new and incorporating things that some portion (I'm not here to debate how much, but the fact they do this tells you which way they're hedging their bets) of the target audience will find objectionable will make it a financial failure. Doing it with an already well-established brand that has a built-in consumer base is safer. Anyone who doesn't understand that at the end of the day, all posturing and debates on either viewpoint aside, is fooling themselves.

Larian, DC, Warner Brothers, Target, Budweiser, every company in the world has one core objective that renders everything else nothing more than "nice to haves" - profitability. DC didn't make an all new character and give them a comic to write about a teenage boy exploring being gay, they took Robin, who had been written for decades as heterosexual and having a girlfriend, and did it, and there is only one reason - money. Because the brand of Robin has a built in consumer base and the calculation, the hope, the risk worth taking in their estimation is they'll keep more of that existing audience then they would in finding a new base audience for something new. It's nothing more than a business decision as to what will make more money at the end of the day no matter how else you want to dress it up. These companies aren't non-profits promoting social or progressive issues and viewpoints, they're companies calculating how to make the most money. There's a perception that promoting one side or the other of some of these issues somehow signals a positive stance morally, and some companies are doing this as well, but I assure you, it's still in a very calculated way.

That's the true tipping point here in expressing yourself as a consumer, and it is the basis of the OP's choice to voice his opinion if he should so choose. Your money is ultimately what guides what companies do. Same goes for everyone who posted afterwards. Arguing the fine points of the matter as has been done in numerous posts in this thread is so often what happens today. There is no more agree to disagree in our world of out of control social media as someone else articulated. It only leads to social divisions, which companies in large part care nothing about.

The only other thing I'd add is directed to anyone defending the bear sex - if you're truly in favor of something like that in a game, a movie, a book, anything at all, people are going to disagree. There is no way possible to demonstrate any need to include something that, universally, people would find highly objectionable. Arguing against censorship is fine, but come on people, find a hill to die on that is at least worthy of your time and energy.

YES.
GTA is something different then f**k bears. Best thing of GTA is driving any car.

Well we know with Cyberpunk 2077 it has a long history of the last 5 games it had in the series of being kid friendly before suddenly coming out being Rated M....

Oh wait, no it didn't.

I suppose it's similar to thinking of a game like Monopoly, good old classic game. But the updated version is full of dildos and sex jokes and BDSM random cards of your character strapped to the back of a car and ass-raped lose $50; Because it's such and intricate core to the gameplay and history of the franchise.

Off hand i can't think of a single D&D game prior that had sexual interactions as a core part of the gameplay (Neverwinter nights had a opening section of talking with prostitutes, but that never led to an in-game sex scene), and has been basically PG-13. You can't just divert off of what is wanted and expected.

Suppose I'm the only one concerned about the scenes being mocapped to begin with. Why would you do that???

That must be some of the most awkward crap ever having to mocap humping someone else for an RPG game about D&D.

We could debate the merits of this but I think it's more important to say CRPGs are not made for little kids. That is not at all the target audience. So I consider it irrelevant.

I guess that everyone who complains about alterations done to a certain IP, or in this case, to what they consider D&D cannon (despite BG III being commissioned, licensed, or being closely tied to the IP owner), would deem heretical any sort of adaptation or derivative art. So any reinterpretation, reimagination, modernization of, for example, a Shakespearian play, that isn't verbatim, would-or, better put, should-need to be burned down in the name of art and purity. Talk about medieval mentality, or of a world of soulless art (Walter Benjamin dixit)... Btw, I bet that in the middle ages people did worse stuff than fuck bears, so I guess we also can't have historical accuracy...

Just kidding, well, not really despite the hyperbole. I'm only quite amazed at how people can react at certain things so wildly and by just basing those reactions on their own made-up assumptions. Why not play the game before judging it? Is there a reasonable reason for going so over-the-top and maximalizing and taking things out of context?

Why do I feel like you wouldn't be asking the same if the thread was about how super exicted the OP is about the bear-lectric boogaloo.

That's what promotional material is for - for people to judge whether they want to buy the game. If we're to assume our impressions irrelevant untill proven by first hand experience with the game, what's the point of all these streams, trailers and stuff?

Believe it or not, i and my younger brother (14 and 12) got introduced to the original Baulder's Gate and other RPG games and enjoyed playing them along with D&D with friends. So i don't see why it wouldn't be fine.

And it's hard to say we can play DooM, but not D&D.

Re: the idea of "pointlessness":

Isn't this, on some level, a similar sort of reasoning people use with "My Rewards" content being locked behind Galaxy? "It's only pointless cosmetic content, you're not even missing anything, you can still win the game and complete 99.9% of the content". My reply to that sentiment is consistently along the lines of "how, on one hand, can the content be pointless, but on the other hand, can the content be an incentive as a reward?". In the case of BG3's content, my argument would proceed similarly: how, on one hand, can the content be pointless, while on the other hand, people are raising cain about it being included?

I cannot speak personally on how pointless the feature is in Cyberpunk. I would say though that what is pointless to one person may be hugely desired by another and make the difference between buying and not buying. Even a buyer who is dissatisfied at the depth of the feature, may feel that an imperfect representation* of what they want is at least some representation, to the point it may be dissatisfying overall but still more satisfying than had it not been in the game at all.

*When I say "imperfect representation/representation", this does not even have to be in reference to stuff being discussed in the current topic. For a "neutral" example, a game could ship with a level editor but the level editor could have various object/mapping limitations. Some people would argue it is better to not have such a feature included at all if it is limited; some people would appreciate it even if it could have been used to a fuller potential.

It's very simple.

You can't legally play the game without buying it. Not everyone has a spare £50 to spaff on a game just to confirm our valid opinions formed from reading and understanding the pre-release materials.

If those pre-release materials don't reflect the game that is released, then that's a developer/publisher problem, not an us problem.

Shrug, I don't use that reasoning. DRM is DRM without regard for whether the gated content is supposed to be pointless or not. The flipside is that at worst, a pointless feature that looks like a marketing gimmick (and potentially misleads buyers who have been promised nudity and who assume the character creation would be representative of what is to come) can just lead to outrage. Which is exactly what happened with Cyberpunk 2077. To the effect that they banned all discussion of in-game nudity...

Right, which is why a rational person just ignores the stuff they don't like instead of trying to take it away from others who do like it. That's what this comes down to no matter how hard you try to dance around it. "Modders should do the icky stuff so I can ignore it more easily" is laughable because 1) it adds extra steps that effectively prevent at least some people from using that content due to complexity/not knowing it exists/etc., and 2) modding doesn't really exist on consoles.

No. The claim wasn't just sex. pds41 clearly said, quote, "the genitalia option cannot add anything beyond showing a bulge in underwear or otherwise as they won't be able to show full nudity or any intercourse. The remove clothes option is either going to be heavily censored or will just end up being to underwear - consistent with every other game out there." But you can show full nudity...the remove clothes option is not censored...other games out there do it...and they're sold in stores. This isn't up for debate.

Oh, I see. GTA is "different" because you don't mind the highly immoral stuff in that one. Got it.

Good job entirely ignoring context and making a straw-man argument. The claim was that BG 3 cannot have visible genitals at all, otherwise it can't be sold in stores. Which is objectively false as I demonstrated. Don't bother with goal-post-moving shenanigans, they don't work. (And what's with "kid friendly"; Baldur's Gate was never that and was rated T. Kid-friendly is E or maybe E 10+.)

Some content should not be present in everyday life in any form! What is the difference between zoophilia and pedophilia? Damn, you really don’t understand that these are mental disorders and this needs to be treated, and not shown in games?