‘Baldur’s Gate 3’s Druid “Bears” It All in Unbelievable New Romance Scene
Baldur’s Gate 3 will let you hook up with a bear and not in the way you’d think. Check out the latest from the final preview.
Baldur’s Gate 3 releases in just under a month. And Larian showed just how far the game has come along in a bold new Panel From Hell that the studio was worried might get them banned from Twitch. And with good reason.
But we’ll get to that in a moment. There was so much on display at the latest community preview. Including worshipping Kuo-Toa, a new blood-soaked PC origin, and textured hairstyles, which don’t sound as exciting, until you see them. And that’s just a small delight. Let’s take a look!
Baldur’s Gate 3 – Panel From Hell Bears All
Now you might not have time to watch the hours-long video, which showcases all the new features of Baldur’s Gate 3 in great detail. But, in a nutshell, the game is big. With millions of lines of dialogue and hundreds of hours of cinematic cutscenes, the show outlasts even Game of Thrones, according to Larian’s internal data. This means there’s a lot of game here.
And it’s not just mindless fetch quests either. One of the biggest pushes in Larian Studios is for your actions to feel like they have consequences. As Swen Vincke, head of Larian likes to put it, they want to make sure there’s a broad spectrum of both positive and negative consequences.
This is why you might have seen clips of characters kissing a goblin’s toe. But the kissing on display at the Release Showcase Panel from Hell was of a much different sort.
As you might expect, Romance is an important part of the cRPG. It’s been an important part of Baldur’s Gate since the beginning. And that holds true for Baldur’s Gate 3, where not only can you be in a romance with multiple characters, you can (and will) have to go on dates. Because, as Larian puts it, it’s not about saying the right combo of dialogue lines and getting rewarded with a sex scene. Relationships take time and energy and effort. But the rewards can be amazing. Even a little wild.
As the whole audience saw when the Druid companion Halsin nearly loses control during a passionate encounter with Vampire twink Astarion. The audience gleefully demanded that Astarion like it, and so…
Sometimes consequences mean getting captured by goblins. Sometimes consequences mean having sex with a Druid in bear form.
First Look at the Monk
This was also a chance to showcase some of the new combat encounter options. Here we see a Monk, the latest class to be added to the game, ready to fight some goblins. Larian revealed that there will be a variety of difficulty modes, including story mode for people who just want to get to the next bit so they can make characters kiss some more, as well as Balanced, and a new “harder” mode called Tactician mode.
This difficulty setting not only changes the makeup of each encounter (adding new foes, new environmental options, and in some cases even new abilities to the enemies), but it amps up the AI as well, making it much more kill-happy. It was so challenging that the Larian team, despite doing three-player multiplayer, got TPK’d live on stream.
A New Origin
Larian also unveiled a new custom character origin. Alongside the custom character you can create (nicknamed Tav), there’s a new option, known as the Dark Urge. This is a bloodlust-driven PC who can either struggle against their inner nature or… lean into it. You might end up feasting on the corpses of your foes, though Larian is confident you won’t.
They know that deep down all players are goody-two shoes who want to be mommy’s special boy, and Larian isn’t afraid to taunt their audience on stream about it either.
Baldur’s Gate 3 releases August 3rd on PC and September 6th on PS5
