Baldur’s Gate 3 Lets You Customize Your Character’s Genitals

The Baldur's Gate 3 character creation screen shows the genital customization option.

Screenshot: Larian Studios / Kotaku

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a big game, and with all that depth and capital C content comes character customization. While you can pick between different races, classes, and appearances, the latest Panel From Hell presentation may have accidentally revealed you can pick your character’s genitals, as well.

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During developer Larian Studios’ Panel From Hell presentation today, July 7, the team showed off some updates to the character customization options that will be available in the full game compared to the early access version currently available. While the studio was primarily focused on things like showing the “maturity” slider that lets you add wrinkles to show age or vitiligo pigmentation, the menu also showed an option to change your character’s genitals at the 4:10:45 mark. The option shown on the screen simply reads “Default,” so it’s unclear just how extensive the customization will be. We’ve reached out to Larian for comment and will update the story if we hear back.

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This is significant because it’s another way, alongside picking your race, body type, and pronouns, that players can customize their character’s identity in the world. Allowing any mix of body type, genitals, and pronouns lets you create a protagonist that can fit into different identities that might align more closely with your own. Cyberpunk 2077 had a similar feature when it launched, but it was both very limiting and got caught up in the game’s weird determining of V’s pronouns by their voice rather than any sort of toggle the player could choose. Hopefully this is the actualization of an RPG that really lets you create a character that reflects your identity and lived experience.

What remains to be seen is whether your genitals actually appear in the game much, as Cyberpunk 2077 only showed your junk in its pause menu when you removed your pants. Larian showed off some of the romance scenes during the Panel From Hell show but cut the feed before things got too hot and heavy lest they get banned from Twitch.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is coming to PC on August 3, with the PlayStation 5 version set to come a month later on September 6. An Xbox Series X/S version is in the cards, but Larian is working on getting the Xbox Series S version working with splitscreen multiplayer before launching on either console.

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New Warzone Season Adds The Boys Characters, Breaks Game

Warzone 2 Season 4 Reloaded features a wild crossover with Amazon Prime series The Boys that adds OP new abilities, leaving players arguing over whether or not the collab is a good one. The Boys series is based on a comic book of the same name that follows a group of vigilantes fighting against superhumans who abuse their abilities—the show is gory, violent, and quite often ridiculous, so naturally, a Call of Duty collaboration would be all three as well.

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But Warzone 2 Season 4 Reloaded added something that many players believe is a bit too ridiculous: superpowers. Temp V is a new field upgrade that’s named for the serum used in the show, which gives people superpowers for 24 hours—finding and using it will briefly give you one of four random superpowers. If you activate the Temp V field upgrade, you’ll lose the ability after a few seconds and need to find another dose, which is presumably a way to keep players from overutilizing them. But that doesn’t make them any less ridiculous.

One of the Temp V abilities is villain Homelander’s Superman-esque laser eyes, and it’s already proven to be wildly overpowered. Triggering the ability will cause you to temporarily hover in the air (you can rotate in any direction to aim) and shoot two powerful laser beams out of your Operator’s eyes. As one redditor suggests alongside a video of the ridiculous ability, these powers “may have been better off with their own game mode.”

The Warzone subreddit is loaded with complaints from players, many of whom are saying the superpowers are out of place in the somewhat grounded military game. One of the abilities lets you super-jump incredibly high with no fall damage when you land, which can seriously change the way a final circle is tackled in the battle royale. “With the stupid addition of superpowers I need to completely change the way that I play this game,” replied one redditor to a player who claimed they lost their game because of the super-jump ability.

But it’s not just the new superpowers that are angering Warzone 2 players. There’s a new, super-powered auto shotgun that clearly needs a nerf straight out of the gate.

I fell off Warzone shortly after it made the switch to the sequel, so when I stumbled across a TikTok showing Starlight from The Boys executing someone with her powerful, light-based abilities, I thought it was a GTA VI mod at first. It is, admittedly, ridiculous.

Though many people are vocally against The Boys stuff in Warzone, there are some people who seem into the crossover, especially on TikTok, though it’s mainly for the cosmetic appeal. Buying a skin for Homelander, Starlight, or Black Noir gives you some cool-looking weapons and a set of themed executions, so if you’re really into spending money to have shinier shit, the crossover may speak to you.

What do you think of the Warzone 2 Season 4 Reloaded The Boys content?

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Baldur’s Gate 2’s Characters Were Inspired By Final Fantasy 7

Lauded for its story, characters, and density of quality fantasy narrative, BioWare’s 2000 RPG Baldur’s Gate II is one of the most celebrated computer games of all time. An adaptation of the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, it aspired to digitize the rich experience of playing at a table among friends, dice and character sheets in hand. But while D&D is often a wellspring of inspiration for deep narrative and rich characters, it turns out a certain Japanese RPG’s late ‘90s crew of misfit environmentalist rebels provided the necessary inspiration to take BG2’s characters to the next level.

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In a recent interview, James Ohlen, BG2’s director of writing, said that Square’s Final Fantasy VII served as the inspiration for his game’s now-iconic characters. The experience, as he describes it, sounds rather intimidating, but it sparked his competitive nature.

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“I went and played Final Fantasy VII,” Ohlen told Rock Paper Shotgun, “and was like, ‘Oh my good god, these character’s make ours look like a bunch of cardboard cutouts.” Ohlen was encouraged to check out Square’s generation-defining PlayStation exclusive after hearing about it from a producer at Interplay and was immediately blown away by the depth of the characters.

To anyone who’s played the original FFVII, this is probably of no surprise. Despite a lackluster language translation here in the west and dialogue that amounted to little more than short sentences in tiny blue boxes, FFVII’s protagonists are a group of troubled people struggling under the weight of a complicated world history, forced to navigate delicate interpersonal relationships. It may be a story about super soldiers, magic orbs, and a dying planet, but FFVII’s characters often contend with relatable human emotions like regret, loss, and love.

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In the same interview, Ohlen recalled his “20,000 hours of dungeon mastering” as an essential foundation of his work in video games. He ran multiple gaming groups while working at a comic shop. “I didn’t really have much of a life outside of Dungeons & Dragons,” he told Rock Paper Shotgun.

The rest of the interview makes for a great read if you’re interested in the inner workings of some classic BioWare titles, which has some anecdotes about how Ohlen “actually totally, entirely ripped off The Empire Strikes Back” when writing the story for Knights of the Old Republic.

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