Baldur’s Gate 3 Players are allowed to choose their genitals, and said choice will appear in-game.
The option is first shown via the final panel from Hell, but only the default genitals are shown on the screen.
Unlike other games that allow you to choose, such as Cyberpunk, your character’s genitals will be depicted in-game, not just in the menu. The character creator doesn’t seem to offer a size slider for genitals like in the SCUM games, but instead the option is labeled “Penis C”.
According to a Kotaku interview with Larian’s lead character artist Alena Dubrovina, not only can you choose whether you have a penis or a waist, but you can also choose pubic hair, which may vary slightly depending on race.
According to Dubrovina, the choice had nothing to do with including a sex scene, but stemmed from the team’s desire for underwear to be part of an outfit that could be customized and worn.
Since the team put so much work into the bottom crack, the team wondered what would happen if players took it off.
“In the beginning we thought, ‘You know, maybe nothing will happen. Maybe we’ll put another underwear net in there. Who cares? But then I started thinking about it, talking about it, and we realized that for some players , it’s just another way of representing their identity,” Dubrovina said.
That said, if nudity isn’t your thing, Baldur’s Gate 3 offers the option to hide nudity.
The genital option also makes the game more inclusive to players, as the development team wanted to prioritize player expressions for different pronouns.
“We follow the needs of the community and work on the features of other games,” Dubrovina said. “We’re looking at what’s being discussed online. There’s a lot going on and I feel like, yeah, games in general are trying to increase their diversity. We definitely want to represent that. So we want to give everyone the opportunity to learn from Choose from a wide range of options.”
Larian’s extensive player expression program made it possible to program voice line recordings to accommodate pronouns, which required additional development time. These options don’t affect gameplay, but will alter the romance scene based on the genitals you choose for your character.
“[The game] There’s a lot of focus on who you are and the ultimate fantasy that you can be anyone, anyone you want to be, and we wanted to represent that,” Dubrovina told Kotaku.
In general, character customization options in Baldur’s Gate 3 are fairly extensive; however, some traits are unique to specific races. Some examples include horn customization for tieflings, specific patterns for dragonborn scales (depending on bloodline), and elves can’t have beards.
Your underwear may also vary depending on your race, but you can pick and wear other underwear throughout the race that is usually reserved for races other than your own.
So keep this in mind when designing the perfect character. If you’re a Dungeons & Dragons purist, you’ll want it to stay a little canon, or at least somewhat, but the ability to change the norm is great. You can choose if you want to keep your character orthodox, but you can also do that if you want to take it a step further.
Baldur’s Gate 3 launches on PC on August 3 and on PlayStation 5 on September 6. While the Xbox Series X/S is further rolled out, the development team is working with Microsoft to resolve issues.
