Baldur's Gate 3 is resoundingly, terrifyingly, bone-quakingly popular. Why? Well, there's its deep and rewarding RPG mechanics, its cast of fascinating characters, and the historically high score it got in PC Gamer's Baldur's Gate 3 review. But mostly it's the bear sex.
Even before it released, BG3's red-hot bear scene—the bear is actually a transmogrified Halsin, in case you forgot—had already gone viral. Which makes sense. It is, after all, quite a unique scene as videogame romances go, and Larian was so proud of it that they made sure to show it off. To everyone. Including their mums.
At a recent BG3 retrospective PAX Panel, cinematic artist (and bear-scene animator) Matt Davis revealed that he showed the scene off to his mother the day after it was first revealed in a pre-release Panel From Hell video. "I remember her words: She was like, 'That's weeeird!'" which is probably also what my mum would say if I tried to show her a scene I had tastefully rendered of a fantasy man getting down with a bear. "Very supportive, though," Davis clarified. That's what mums are for.
The fact the scene featured in BG3's pre-release marketing apparently came as a surprise to Davis. "What makes it even better was: I had no idea that it was gonna get shown at that Panel From Hell."
David said he remembers being at Larian's Dublin office and watching the Panel From Hell go out on the day of launch. Pointing to writing director Adam Smith, Davis said "You were on stage and like, 'We've shown you one romance scene, now let's show you another!'"
Per Davis, everyone else in the office expected something relatively sedate and polite: Gale's romance, perhaps. But that wasn't what they got. "I immediately knew… I turned [and] I just said, 'They're doing the beeeear!'"
Reader, they were, indeed, doing the bear.
Which turned out, of course, to be a peerless bit of marketing. "It signified a kind of upward turn in the momentum towards the launch of the game," said Davis, "to see the reception it got after that was just—it was crazy. It was the first thing that I worked on to take off like that… I'm really happy with how the community took to it."
Boy, did they. The bear scene quickly went viral, blazing a steamy internet trail across social media and ginning up a fair amount of hype for the final game. That virality wasn't even hampered by a TikTok ban. "We were doing the Panel From Hell stream," chimed in Larian boss Swen Vincke, "and so the bear scene had just shown, and I saw the publishing team. They were super excited, and they were yelling, 'We got banned on TikTok!'"
Despite that, everyone loved it. Or at least, everyone outside of Larian loved it. Coworkers who stumbled across Davis working on the scene were maybe a little perturbed.
"At the office we were in at the time, my desk is right next to the kitchen," said Davis, which made for some awkward encounters. "I was going to get a coffee," said Smith, "and I saw things I did not expect to see."
Davis continued, "I'd been working on it for so long that you kind of get numb to it, almost. And people walk by the desk and they're just like, 'What are you doing?'"
What he was doing was making one of BG3's most iconic scenes. The rest, I suppose, is history.
