BioWare, the veteran RPG studio today best known for making Mass Effect and Dragon Age, has long been the king of awkward video game sex scenes.


As writer Tom Bissell put it back in 2012 after Mass Effect 3 came out: "BioWare's talented storytellers desperately need to rethink their curious devotion to the video-game sex scene, gay or otherwise, which, even at its best, remains as polygonally unconvincing as digital representation gets." Yep. Pretty much.

So it is with great amusement we can look at the recently-released ESRB rating for the upcoming Dragon Age: Inquisition, which is out November 18, and just try to imagine what this will look like in-game:

The game includes some sexual material: a female character briefly depicted in front of a man's torso (fellatio is implied); characters depicted topless or with exposed buttocks while lying in bed or after sex; some dialogue referencing sex/sexuality (e.g., "'I will bring myself sexual pleasure later, while thinking about this with great respect'" and "The way your t*ts bounce when I pin your arms and take you on the side of the bed…"). The words "f**k," "sh*t," and "a*shole" appear in dialogue.


Now, to spend the next four weeks trying to envision the context in which a Dragon Age: Inquisition character says, "I will bring myself sexual pleasure later, while thinking about this with great respect."

[h/t Amanda]