The Controversy Surrounding Nudity in Baldur's Gate 3
An Xbox player accidentally gets themselves banned for an entire year after recording Baldur's Gate 3 scenes featuring nudity. While Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate 3 feature nudity in several scenes, this content can be toggled in the options to a varying degree. For Baldur's Gate 3, not only can players choose to remove nudity entirely, but they can also disable other explicit content, such as certain scenes from most Baldur's Gate 3 romance paths. This freedom of options, as well as Larian's decision to normalize nudity, was received favorably by most players, as the role it plays in Baldur's Gate 3 is rarely (if ever) gratuitous.
That being said, this hasn't stopped players from having their fun with nudity in Baldur's Gate 3, as single-handedly raiding the Goblin Camp wearing nothing but one's birthday suit is certainly a choice that Barbarians in Baldur's Gate 3 can make. Though Xbox won't punish players outright for engaging with explicit content in Baldur's Gate 3, there is an important thing to consider if a person wants to avoid a ban.
As an Xbox player named Daddy-Vegas discovered, taking a screenshot or recording a video that features nudity in Baldur's Gate 3 (or seemingly any other game on Xbox) breaks the platform's rules of conduct. While he had no intention of publicly sharing this content on the Xbox social platform, the minute the videos were recorded, they were automatically uploaded to Microsoft's servers. Daddy-Vegas was given three infractions, which ultimately resulted in a one-year ban from using online features by Xbox Code Enforcement.
Though he is hopeful that appealing to the ban will work in his favor, many Baldur's Gate 3 players feel that this incident highlights a larger issue with Xbox's moderation. A few of the suggestions made in the Reddit thread are to add a 'mature' tag option for screenshots or videos, to disable the automatic server upload, or to mark any content from M-rated games as 'mature'. While Xbox users can opt out of the automatic server upload, this option isn't turned off by default.
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The post on Reddit
The Challenges of Baldur's Gate 3 Launch on Xbox
Baldur's Gate 3's launch on Xbox hasn't been as smooth as Larian could have hoped for, as issues with player saves still persist even after the latest firmware patch. Though Michael Douse, the Director of Publishing at Larian Studios, assured fans that Microsoft was working on a permanent fix to the problem, the inability to freely play one of the best games of 2023 has certainly frustrated Xbox players.