Warning: This mod is “very NSFW”, according to its author.
Don’t look at me, you clicked on this. I’m just the messenger, doing my civic duty by informing you that a new Baldur’s Gate 3 mod overhauls the game’s weirdest romance scene. No, not the bear shagging, or the devil succubus bit. The astral plane-etration with The Emperor.
Ring a bell? Good. Now, let’s pretend this isn’t awkward. As you might know, tweaking and adding to BG3’s array of romance arcs and scenes has been one of the main things those trying in-depth stuff with the game’s modding tools have been experimenting with for a while. After all, trying to put together big custom campaigns like Path To Menzobarranzan and The Grand Theater isn’t everyone’s bag.
The latest romance overhaul to hit Nexus Mods is ‘Astral Plane Romance Overhaul (Squid’s Game)‘, and it’s the work of modder Almasy87, who’s previously overhauled Astarion’s romance scenes, because of course they have.
Basically, it revamps that scene with his squidness/his less squiddy disguise, by doing things like “adding tender and sexy voices (re-cut and re-made from the originals)”, “some new hot scenes with animations” and “some extra Tav nodes to allow for more RP and to show more intimacy and care for both the Emperor and Guardian’s feelings”. Phwoar.
The game’s clearly not made it easy for Almasy87 to deliver these tweaks either, with the modder noting that the mod only works perfectly with “female body 1 Tav/Durge, and male body 1 Guardian” for now, though they do plan on optimising other body type combos in future.
There are also two things you should probably be aware of for immersion purposes, these being that “there may be a few scenes where the characters don’t exactly touch the ground perfectly” due to the limitations of the existing toolkit, and that you may end up with an, er, unexpected audience.
“Working on this was a pain because this scene contains a lot of “peepers” (companions and the random NPCs from the Stelmane scene) that are set to hidden, but every time you hotload (fundamental for this type of edit) the game doesn’t know that the characters are supposed to be hidden, so they ALL reappear,” Almasy87 explains regarding the latter, “That meant all the companions, Emperor, Guardian, mustache man and Stelmane were all spawning on TOP of my animations, making it HELL to test or even SEE anything until I forcefully set them to invisible in the ENTIRE timeline.
“I did it for the Stelmane scene NPCs, but I don’t have time to do it for all the companions too – so it’s still possible that if you reload halfway through you’ll see random companions in the background here and there.” Minthara in particular is prone to this kind of thing it seems, I assume because she’s keen to egg you on as you make questionable choices, as usual.
So, this is a thing, if you don’t fancy being boring and just making love to Wyll in overhauled fashion instead. Let us know below, preferably in all caps, if you can’t wait to give Squid Game a go.