I still remember my first time. It was with Leliana inDragon Age: Origins. The French-accented Orlesian redhead wasn’t my first choice of person to keep me warm on those cool nights around the campfires, but I utterly failed to shit-talk the witch Morrigan into liking me so I was left with the more traditionally wooable bardstress.
After I delivered the crucial lines to seal the deal, what followed was a couple of minutes of the stiffest (oi, no snickering in the back), most ungainly lovemaking I’d ever seen on screen. Dear God It was bad: lifeless eyes, embarrassingly over-dramatised choral music, strange fade-in and -outs between cloying moments of badly animated intimacy. Then, when it’s all over, you go back to talking to each other in that ‘safe two-metre distance’ way typical of Bioware games, making you wonder if the whole tumble-around happened in your dirty little imagination.
And yes, sure, that was over 10 years ago now, but sex scenes in games still feel more miss than hit, don’t they? Are the sex scenes inThe Witcher 3, for example, really as sexy as the little mating rituals, the innuendos, the coy exchanges of looks, and rushed courtships leading up to them, or just something you sit through just so you can say you’ve now banged this or that character (because what is a Steam achievement for bedding a character if not a notch on the bedpost)?
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In fairness, in my current playthrough of The Witcher 3, I’ve just had my little romance with Keira Metz, and there were bits of the whole thing that were well done. The writing in the leadup was good, there was flirtation aplenty, we went on a dungeon-diving adventure that may or may not have been a euphemism all along, then there’s a nice little sequence where you use your witcher senses to follow clues in the form of discarded bits of clothing, which invariably lead you to a scantily clad Keira–a lady who knows what she wants. The climactic scene itself was a little weirdly animated, a little awkward, but it was nice and brief, and crucially none if it felt as painfully earnest as Bioware’s efforts–from Dragon Age to Mass Effect Andromeda.
Our Jervon Perkins recently wrote abouthis romantic encounters in Mass Effect, and the beauty of it lies in the love story that gets crafted through a mixture of head canon and game writing, not in the fact that at the end of it all you get two virtual mannequins bumping up against each other.
Gaming’s general shonkiness around depicting sex means that I breathed a sigh of relief whenStarfield’s classification rating for Australia received themildest possible rating for sex content(in other words,nosex content). Actually, maybe ‘sigh of relief’ isn’t strictly true, because romance options are the last thing on my mind when I get hyped about an upcoming Bethesda RPG. These games are about exploring rich worlds, getting embroiled in strange side-quests, and carving out a head-canon for my character; the prospect of sleeping with NPCs just doesn’t factor into that–my mind’s too busy for such frivolities Unlike CDPR and Bioware, Bethesda has never really ‘gone there’ when it comes to sex, and I suspect that’s because strong interpersonal character writing and animations have never been a strong suit of the studio (in fact, I’d probably rank those areas among Bethesda’s weakest as a developer).
Seeing how RPGs with a far stronger focus on character drama and writingstillfumble around depictions of sex (call me a prude, but I think a 30s Hollywood-style ‘fade to black’ still does the job better than most games), I think it’s fair to say Bethesda’s endearing top nerd and Game Director Todd Howard wouldn’t do a better job of it? His whole ‘thing’ is using AI and systems to get a world’s NPCs to engage in weird dynamic conversations that havegiven us endless years of entertainment. Bethesda RPGs are more about simulating worlds and creating roleplaying sandboxes than they are about deep characterisation and romance, as evidenced by the fact that the most recognisable romance option in their games is frickingLydiafrom Skyrim. The fact that Bethesda is staying away from sex in Starfield is definitely a good thing, because it means they’re staying in their lane. Leave the raunchy stuff to the games that actually care about it (and even in those, do these scenes really ‘do it’ for you?).
Beyond the sexless Starfield, whether it’s in movies or games, the most tantalising aspect of romance is always the buildup–the simmering tensions, the weird little rituals that a pair of people attracted to each other create for themselves–rather than the end result, the depiction of sex itself. I just watched BlacKKKlansman (late to the party, I know), and something that struck me is that we see romance blossom between two people, and you know what?We don’t see them bang,and we don’t need to, becauseinsteadwe get to see their chemistry develop through excellent scenes like this.I think games still have a lot to learn in this area, and where better to learn from than great cinema?
