Baldur's Gate 3 is a game of grand adventure, a game of nuanced character choices, a game of creative problem solving, a game full of literally hundreds of spells. It's also a game where you can have sex with a bear. Guess which of the above rocketed Baldur's Gate 3 to viral mainstream attention just a few weeks before release? I expected Baldur's Gate 3 to be big, but I did not expect a marketing campaign highlighting a sex scene with a bear (okay, to be clear, it's a sex scene with a druid who can transform into a bear) to help Baldur's Gate 3 pull in 800,000 concurrent players over the weekend.
"Yeah, me neither," Larian founder Swen Vincke told me in an interview on Monday. But he did explain why the Baldur's Gate 3 studio thought it was a good showcase for the game, which turned out to be the exact right instinct in the leadup to release.
