Baldur’s Gate 3 is shaping up to be one of the most anticipated games of the year. The game has been rated Mature by the ESRB, revealing some of its explicit content.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a role-playing game that follows the journey of a hero attempting to vanquish an evil corruption. The gameplay involves exploring a fantasy world, completing quests, and engaging in strategic, turn-based combat against various enemies, including fantasy creatures and human-like adversaries. Players use weapons and magic spells, with combat often being intense and accompanied by sounds of pain, explosions, and blood-spatter effects.
Violent and graphic content is present in both gameplay and cutscenes. These can include depictions of mutilated or dismembered bodies, decapitation, disembowelment, and scenes of torture, the majority of which occur off-screen. Players can influence these outcomes through dialogue choices in certain scenarios.
The game contains nudity, with characters shown fully exposed in certain scenes. There are also instances of implied sexual activity, depicted with strategic camera angles or fading out before the act. These include moments of characters appearing to initiate sexual acts or being found in intimate positions.
This is a role-playing game in which players assume the role of a hero on a quest to cleanse an evil corruption. From an overhead perspective, players explore a fantasy kingdom, complete quests, and battle evil forces in turn-based combat. Players use weapon attacks and magic spells (e.g., poison spray, fire bolt) to defeat human-like enemies and fantasy creatures (e.g., demons, goblins, imps). Battles are sometimes frenetic, with impact sounds, cries of pain, and explosions; some attacks are depicted from a third-person viewpoint. Characters emit blood-splatter effects when hit, leaving large stains on the ground. A handful of areas depict mutilated/dismembered corpses with exposed viscera. Cutscenes contain more intense violence and gore: a man decapitated off-screen, with his severed head held up; a woman disemboweled, with exposed entrails; a character’s exposed brain extracted from his skull; a bound man’s eyes gouged out. In one sequence, players make dialogue choices to determine the method of violence when extracting information from a prisoner (e.g., hot poker to the thigh; butt of a spear to the groin; toenail removal); most of these acts occur off-screen, as the prisoner is seen reacting to pain. The game contains instances of nudity: characters with exposed breasts, buttocks, and genitalia. A handful of sequences depict topless characters engaging in brief sexual activity (e.g., positioning a character’s head over a partner’s groin area; sliding a character’s hands towards a partner’s crotch); the sexual acts are depicted off-screen or with obscured camera angles. One sequence depicts a nude couple on the beach moments before engaging in sexual activity—the camera pans up and the scene fades out. The words “f**k,” “sh*t,” and “c*ck” are heard in the game.
Baldur’s Gate 3 will be out on August 3 for PC and September 6 on PS5. It was released in Early Access in July 2020.
