“Storylines Have Been Cut”: Baldur’s Gate 3 Actor Warns That Diversity Is Being Removed From Some Games

Ever since Donald Trump’s win in the 2024 US presidential election, companies and their executives were quick to try and curry favour with the president. This included ditching DEI initiatives and policies, which even more companies later joined them on, following an anti-DEI executive order from Trump. While many of these initiatives were strictly about hiring practices, the sentiment behind this shift in policy was felt everywhere, with the rise in racist, transphobic, and other bigoted laws and attitudes across the United States and beyond.

Now, it seems that the gaming industry is not immune to this either. Speaking with me in an interview that will be published tomorrow, actor Samantha Béart, who played Karlach in Baldur’s Gate 3, tells me that they are already aware of game devs who have had their work censored, as the industry appears to be bowing down to the regressive politics of Trump’s second term.

Queer Stories Might Be Getting Censored In Games

This came up in my chat with Béart when I asked if, in our current climate, they feared that a game as diverse as Baldur’s Gate 3 would struggle to get greenlit now.

“Without exposing devs, I know that’s happening. Their storylines have been cut,” they tell me. “Historically, appeasement is a really bad thing.”

Despite this, they are optimistic that this won’t last forever. “Indies exist. And people can write, and communities will get together, and we will absolutely get through this together.”

This also comes amid the revival of the GamerGate movement, which is seeing developers, journalists, and many others in the gaming industry harassed online. It also means we often see the argument that games with characters that are non-white and/or queer will sell poorly. Baldur’s Gate 3 quite obviously disproved that, as it was reported to have sold 15 million copies as of November 2024.

As Béart alludes to, not everyone in the industry is going backwards. The indie scene can allow for more creative freedom, as there’s no publisher to appease. It’s worth noting that Baldur’s Gate 3 was self-published too. This also isn’t anything we haven’t come back from before, as back in the 2000s, we saw Mass Effect 2 devs forced to write out a queer romance for the companion Jack, in response to negative attention from Fox News. We’ve certainly come a long way since then, with plenty of games allowing for queer romances now.