Baldur’s Gate 3 has been on Xbox Series X/S for just under a month, and while there have been a few technical issues with the RPG since arriving on the platform, none has been more far-reaching than one that sprouted up over the weekend banning Xbox accounts that record and upload clips of sex scenes or any moments that contain nudity. (This can be any scene in the game, because you can remove all clothes from your party at any time.)
News of the bans spread on Reddit with a thread by user Daddy-Vegas, who posted a screenshot of three separate bans to the Xbox account Big Daddy LV tied to clips of “naked camp time fun.” The longest of these three suspensions will end on December 28, 2024. Several users have rallied around him and even reported similar issues with other games.
“Xbox: Puts a game on their console that has nudity
Also Xbox when someone records it: Agagahagfhahdhahhdha” – Sublime-Chaos
“Funny how you can clip blowing up a tank or mass murdering a platoon in bunkers but not allowed to show weenies” – CaptainMoisty
“Made that mistake with the attack on titan game (which doesn’t even have any sort of inappropriate full frontal nudity), and didn’t get to appeal. so annoying that it automatically resorts to banning you instead of letting you know you should delete it hope you get the appeal, that really sucks” – lmaoolivia
In an interview with DualShockers, Daddy-Vegas explained that the clips were automatically uploaded to the public server via Xbox’s settings, which resulted in the ban. The suspension is pretty thorough and fundamentally alters how someone interacts with the Xbox ecosystem. This includes revoking privileges for broadcasting, uploading clips and screenshots, creating and joining Xbox parties, editing your profile, and other communication through the platform.
Daddy-Vegas tells Kotaku the entire ban happened “in 30 seconds, with no warning or chance to correct the error,” and was likely implemented by a bot.
Looking at Xbox’s community standards, there’s a section for keeping one’s content “clean,” that prohibits users from sharing and distributing screenshots and clips that have “mature sexual content.” However, as laid out on Xbox’s official website, the console’s default setting is to automatically upload footage to its servers as opposed to simply saving them natively on the console’s hard drive. So if you haven’t gone out of your way to turn this setting off, you’re basically tripping and falling into a trap of Microsoft’s own making.
In the DualShockers interview, Daddy-Vegas said he has since turned off the automatic uploads, but didn’t realize they would be uploaded where the public could see them when he recorded those scenes. He said he would understand a short-term ban for his mistake, but the year-long suspension feels egregious.
“I just took a screenshot of content presented to me as designed by Larian Studios, in a game Xbox took my money for, using a feature there’s literally a button for smack in the middle of the controller,” he said to DualShockers. “I didn’t go out of my way to create adult content in an otherwise innocent game; I simply documented the content presented to me in a game very clearly rated M for Nudity and Strong Sexual Content. I feel like it’s if you recorded Game of Thrones on your DVR and your cable company suspended your TV service because someone was naked in the episode.”
We’ve reached out to Larian Studios and Microsoft and will update this story if we hear back. For more on Baldur’s Gate 3, check out Kotaku’s review.
Update, 1/4/24, 9:45 a.m.: Larian is looking into the issue and is in talks with Microsoft about a possible solution. Director of Publishing Michael Douse said on X (formerly Twitter) that the team has seen reports of the bans associated with uploading Baldur’s Gate 3‘s steamy scenes and thinks they’re “annoying and uncool.” Baldur’s Gate 3 has already gotten around some of Microsoft’s policies, like the Xbox Series X and S versions not having feature parity because the S doesn’t support splitscreen co-op, so I guess we’ll see if Larian can work its way around more of Xbox’s rules.
