Baldur’s Gate 3 bear love scene leads to massive sales increase

People feel bullish on the RPG after Larian Studios’ latest reveal

Being a Dungeons & Dragons adaptation, Baldur’s Gate 3 is full of possibilities that you’d never even have thought about – like having a romance scene involving a druid in their bear form. We are not talking about a bear as in a burly and lovable guy with lots of body hair here, but a bear as in a member of the Ursidae family. At least on the outside. There’s still a human soul inside of all that fur somewhere, but let’s not get caught up in specifics: Baldur’s Gate 3 contains a romantic tryst with a bear.

Larian Studios revealed this in a recent livestream and this turned out to be a brilliant decision as the RPG, which is set to release on August 3, 2023, on PC and on September 6, 2023, on PS5, is currently storming upwards in Steam’s charts. Compared to last week, Bladur’s Gate 3 has jumped up by 27 places on Steam’s list of top sellers, now ranking just outside the top five on the sixth rank.

This goes to show once again that gamers love their saucy scenes in video games and that Larian knows how to pander to its audience: Rockstar famously made headlines with Red Dead Redemption 2 when people found out about its realistic horse testicle physics and CD Projekt RED similarly gained lots of free publicity for Cyberpunk 2077 when it was revealed that the RPG’s character creation would entail customizable genitals – which was absolutely irrelevant for the rest of the game, but you could do it.

Aside from being a great marketing move, this whole affair, which got Larian banned from TikTok for that little bit of controversy this scenario needed, really drives home the amount of freedom players will have in Baldur’s Gate 3 – after all, it was up to the audience during the livestream to make the decisions that led to this hilarious scene in the first place.

And before some people hastily clutch their pearls and accuse the developers of zoophilia or some other nonsense: Obviously there won’t be any graphical depictions of what’s going on – the ESRB mentions some light nudity in the game (one of the reasons for the Mature rating), but no explicit intercourse scenes.