Seriously, it's like these two games are in the exact opposite side of the spectrum for horniness and only one of them understands the appeal of sex beyond a vaguely transgressive aesthetic
In BG3 I had to sit there and click through a bunch of options every step of the way in order to fuck the squid guy, and each option was concerned with the emotional and sensory experience of fucking the squid guy. Like you had to choose to grab his tentacle, decide if you wanted to kiss or caress it or part the tentacles to find a mouth, decide that you wanted to keep going, decide how you were feeling about it, etc. It was a tender scene that did not shy away from eroticism, even if it was played slightly for comedy at the end (your companion's reactions when it turns out they could totally see you fucking the squid guy)
In Cyberpunk 2077 I got pretty much ambushed with a sex scene with some random hot corporate/military lady that was a few minutes of me looking at the screen, bored out of my mind while aggressive guitar riffs played and virtual titties glowed in the pink neon light, almost disembodied because there's so many camera cuts to keep up with the aggressive guitar riffs. Like I thought I was picking up a quest from this NPC I met exactly twice, for a previous quest, but no, it's just the "reward" of... an extremely vanilla sex scene but trying really hard to look kinky. The hot lady has vinyl tape over her nipples, you see. There's a dildo on the floor of the motel. Nevermind that the only things implied in this scene are her going down on you and... idk, scissoring I guess? Wow, so adult, what a mature game, how transgressive... It isn't even a rare or unique thing to experience in this game, you get the exact same scene with any "joytoy" (that's what sex workers are called here) you choose to hire off the street.
Okay so in BG3 you can go to Hell and fuck a succubus, but in exchange, the succubus gets to keep your image and use it to fuck whoever. The catch is that you will feel when you're being "used" in this way, it can happen at any time and you'll have no say about it. Obviously, this concept alone is hornier than any number vinyl-taped boobs. However, a less horny game would have just stopped there. Or would have made this into an unmitigated power/desirability fantasy of your character being just so hot all the hot devils in hell are irresistibly attracted to you and isn't that fun and hot. But BG3 understands that the reason losing agency is a kink is... the loss of agency, being a plaything whether you want it or not. So you get your companions worried about the deal you just made. You even have a moment where your character actually feels someone doing something and it's treated as inconvenient, almost embarrassing. Astarion, if nearby, will actually comment on that and offer emotional support because he knows what it's like to be someone else's plaything.
Contrast with Cyberpunk's "dolls." In Night City there's a brothel that has its workers implant "behavioral chips" so that an algorithm matches a client with a "doll," and then the chip takes over and makes them act in whatever way the algorithm decided would fulfill the client's deepest desires. Once the encounter is over, the chip releases control and the doll goes back to being a person, with no memory of the encounter. Now while I was doing whatever quest nearby, I can hear two NPCs talking about it. One is perplexed because it's so much more expensive to pay for a session at this brothel than it is to get an actual doll with super advanced behavioral programming or whatever, since the worker has no input and won't remember anything anyway. The other NPC explains that this is different because it's "actual flesh" and not just "cold latex," which the first NPC rejects because it feels the same (this is the future) and they argue about the minutiae of actual skin vs. plastic skin vis-ร -vis sexual feedback.
This is so stupid I feel like I shouldn't have to point this out but... both drone kinks and hypnotism kinks are a thing that would perfectly map to this concept of "dolls" in cyberpunk. The thing that makes "dolls" appealing is not that "they feel more real than latex" is that they are actual people with all of their agency removed for the sake of sexual pleasure. That's what people would pay for in the world of Cyberpunk. These aren't even kinks that do much for me but even I can see why they're a thing?? The objectification of a person is the actual kink served here, but the game doesn't fucking realize this or tries to ignore it entirely, in which case... why is this even in the game in the first place? It's just the most boring way to say "this is the future and it's gritty, which means people FUCK and PAY for SEX but in a FUTURISTIC way. We live in a SOCIETY. BOTTOM TEXT."
I do like Cyberpunk 2077 but for whatever CDPR does next with it (codename "Orion" I think?) I hope the team understands that their vision of cyberpunk is so backwards and mired in the same Gen-X baggage that spawned Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk setting in the first place that it reads as "pleasantly quaint" to people living in the present.
It's quaint not just because every car is some kind of Delorean and every bike is some kind of Kaneda's Bike and people wear weird jackets have "cyberdecks" but also because of the above ideas about what's hot and tittilating are so...old as to be cute in a sad way when paired with things like a catalog of shitty night clubs and such.
Added Disclaimer: I honestly think some of it is cool! But! But! I also recognize I'm a cishet straight millennial squarely in the game's target demo, and I desperately hope CDPR are also cognizant of how limited that box is before it becomes a weight around their next project's neck.
- Some of that sounds like it's directly taken from William Gibson's Neuromancer, where people could work in brothels as "meat puppets" by renting out their bodies, programmed to enact someone else's fantasies, while their minds were blanked out.
One of the main characters was earning money to pay for her implants that way (implants that included weaponisable razor blades in her fingers.) But of course with it being a dystopian future the fantasies would become extremely violent, and of course the programmed amnesia would start to fail. Memories would leak through of doing horrible things (implied to be committing physical multilation or even murder on other "meat puppets"), causing the character to experience a strong motivation to try to get out of that kind of sex work.
Anyway, it's not an original concept of that game.
- Not surprised to hear that the game that famously used transphobic and gamergate dogwhistles for its marketing is bad at sex. This isn't a Gen X thing per se (because Gen X people didn't invent transphobia), so much as it's the studio's own direction from the start to approach anything along those lines as being performed in order to be edgy for a gamergate audience, than written to be felt from the inside by the characters, as good sex scenes often are.
I would not expect that studio to improve in the future on that front, because they never took any responsibility for the kind of GG hatred they ginned up against people pointing out how the marketing was transphobic. There was no learning from trying to attract that kind of audience. They mostly doubled down. I saw trans people driven off social media by hate mobs at the time for saying it was transphobic. The fucking Qu*rtering did outrage videos funneling his GG supporters at people who dared to talk about the game that way.
Heck, one of the times I had to be more than averagely careful online was when an Eurogamer journalist was conned into writing a sympathetic article about the CD Projekt/GOG social media person who was eventually canned after making some of the dogwhistle tweets (not that that was the end of the dogwhistle marketing for the game, which IIRC outlasted the specific employee.) The article was just giving out that guy's POV and excuses.
At the time I was a mod for the Eurogamer YouTube channel. I tweeted in response to the article, asking the writer why the article was platforming the views of someone who was fired for transphobic tweets, rather than say choosing to interview the trans people driven offline by hate mobs for pointing out there was a problem with the marketing.
I remember saying that if you were openly bigoted in any other job, it would not be surprising to be fired. So why give this guy that kind of tiny violins treatment? The writer replied to me a couple of times in good faith. I didn't think he deliberately set out to platform a bigot, so much as he was naive in his interview. I said it was the kind of thing that should have been picked up on at an editorial level - an editor should step in if you get too caught up in an interviewee's POV, and fail to hold onto a wider perspective in your article. An editor should have intervened before they published it. Not least because now it leaves the writer exposed in this way. One of the other EG mods was also reading and responding supportively to those tweets, pointing out how some of this pattern plays into tried and tested GG tactics that the site should have remembered from the bad old days.
And of course the fucking Qu4rtering's hate mob viewers were around in the thread, and started trying to snitch tag in the fucking Qu4rtering - who I had pre-emptively blocked a long time before, thank fuck. (Something else that probably helped me back then: I never listed in my Twitter bio that I was an EG channel mod, so anyone looking me up for retaliation on Twitter would be less likely to realise where I was coming from. Like you would have needed to watch the channel at the time to know that, which most fans of the fucking Qu*rtering didn't do.)
I remember my fellow EG mod was being extra solicitous with me at the time, I would guess because he was concerned that with the snitch tagging, I might start taking more than the usual amount of flack. He had been a mod for longer than me, and had been hate brigaded online at one point (specifically for being an EG mod.) We had conversations about using mass blocking tools to manage Twitter, because he had prior experience from the times hate mobs had tried to contact his workplace, and dox him and his family (including his school age kids.)
Anyway, getting back to the article on the fired CD Projekt/GOG employee, EG eventually found out he had links to a website owned by someone with GG ties. So EG had been missing context when they published the original article with its one sided tiny violins for how the guy lost his job. The Qu4rtering went after the EG writer for EG's shift on editorial stance (if you look up the original article you can see they added context to it after the fact.) So the writer got hate mobbed by GGaters for his troubles. And the fired employee then went off to work for the Qu4rtering. Basically they got played. Never platform GGaters, folks. Even if you do it by accident, if you then try to correct your mistake you still end up feeding the kind of outrage videos that the likes of the fucking Qu*tering will use to stoke up his hate mobs for more clicks and views.
And IIRC Cyberpunk 2077 went on to use even more transphobic dogwhistling in its marketing. And I remember all the folks who boycotted the game for that. I remember the smaller streamers who were holding out against the huge popularity of the game just before release, willing to take a hit to views by not buying or streaming it. I also remember the longtime TTRPG fans who had been very excited about a video game based on Pondsmith's system for years and years, who sadly stepped back from it because they were so alienated by the marketing.
The studio has never taken any responsibility for all the hatred their fucking video game ginned up and aimed at anyone saying: "Hey, this is transphobic. Please stop. I want to feel excited about this game, but this is putting me off. Please address this before release, so I can enjoy the game." They only ever doubled down.
So I wouldn't hold my breath on that one.
BG3 is written by people who understand how to write what sex can feel like from the inside, so it can convincingly be any number of things at once, including being joyfully ridiculous on occasion. Eg: You can ask one of the Drow sex worker twins to roleplay having routine sex as if you've been married for over a decade, and he is written as being more shocked and turned on by the novelty of that, than by any of the other spicy scenarios you can ask him for. ๐ In that dialogue tree, you can then tell him that you want to roleplay being too tired to have sex, and so you both roll over and go to sleep. And he will do it. He will roll over and pretend to start snoring, but BEAR IN MIND THAT DROW DON'T SLEEP. HE IS FAKING THE SNORING JUST FOR YOUR GRATIFICATION! ๐คฃ It's warm and hilarious across several axes at once.
You will never see that kind of writing in a game that is pitched for GGaters.
