Larianhas shared how it went big onTikTok, and it turns out thatthe infamous Halsin romance scenemight have hindered more than it helped. Speaking atGDC, the studio explains its social media strategy, and what it’s learned fromBaldur’s Gate 3going viral.
The talk, hosted by Larian’s creative content director Ben Maltz-Jones, took us behind the scenes of Baldur’s Gate 3’s success, and how that played out over its social media channels. As part of this talk, Maltz-Jones briefly alluded to perhaps the game’s most memorable viral moment, the Halsin wild shape sex scene - and how TikTok absolutely hated it.
In the talk, Maltz-Jones admitted that sharing a clip from the Halsin romance scene was in breach of TikTok’s content policy. “What works on TikTok? Not bear sex,” he says. “They hate it.”
This is backed up by our own Community Manager, Trevor Ford, who was quick to tell me that we’ve also had a video taken down for including this scene. This is fairly surprising, given that the scene first came to our attentionwhen it was livestreamed by Larian itself. It seems that all of the other platforms were fine with hosting this material - it was just TikTok that drew the line here.
To me, authenticity means running the Larian account as if it were a fan account
Still, I think it’s fair to say that the gamble paid off. Even if Baldur’s Gate 3 was briefly known as ‘that game that lets you shag a bear’, it got everyone’s attention, and it quickly became apparent that there are other things to do in this game too. For example,you may also shag a mind flayer.
Jokes aside, Baldur’s Gate 3’s success on social media can’t be denied. Even without being able to share the Halsin romance scene, Larian’s account now sits at more than 270,000 followers. This is up from just 591 followers a year before Baldur’s Gate 3 launched. Maltz-Jones pins this success on “running the Larian account as if it were a fan account.” This definitely shows, with the account frequently sharing memes and engaging with the fanbase, rather than sharing anything too official. More mature posts are kept to Larian’s YouTube account, which is the opposite of its TikTok, in that its audience doesn’t take well to the more lighthearted posts.
