Even before Baldur’s Gate 3 was released and became a sensation, fans knew one thing about the fantasy game: it was the one where you could have sex with a bear.

There is, of course, some important context necessary when it comes to ursine romance in the game — for one thing, it’s actually the druid Halsin in bear form, as opposed to, you know, an actual bear — but when the scene was debuted months before the game came out on a promotional stream, it blew some minds, and certainly changed the conversation surrounding the game’s release. During the Baldur’s Gate 3: A Retrospective panel at PAX West 2024, the team responsible remembered what it was like to be in that very strange moment.

“It signaled an upwards turn in the momentum towards the launch of the game, I think,” Matt Davis — the cinematic artist who made the whole thing look so… good(…?) remembered. “To see the reception it got after [being shared during the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW846h6FyU4 pre-release Panel From Hell stream] was just, like… it was crazy. It was the first thing I worked on to take off like that, in that way. I’m really happy with how the community took to it.”

“I remember, we were doing the Panel From Hell stream, and the bear scene had just shown, and I saw the publishing team, they were super excited,” added Larian founder and creative director Swen Vincke. “They were yelling, ‘We got banned on TikTok!’”

Later in the panel, Davis admitted that the scene was “mostly probably just dropped on me, with not a lot of hullabaloo or anything.” He continued, “I got the scene, it was assigned to me, I started looking at the dialogue file and was like, ‘Oh, this is a steamy scene with Halsin,’ and then I was like, ‘Oh, there’s a few options here. Oh. Oh, okay.’ I was like, ‘How do I do this?’”

Arguing that more work went into the non-bear portions of the scene, he went on to say, “I don’t think anyone really had seen it too much outside of, maybe, my direct lead […and] I’d been working on it for so long, you kind go get numb to it, almost, and people just walked by the desk and they’re like, ‘What are you doing?’”

Baldur’s Gate 3 is available now. PAX West 2024 continues through September 2 at the Seattle Convention Center. Watch the full Baldur’s Gate 3: A Retrospective panel below.

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