Story scenes must fit into these environments, because creating new places just for a narrative moment would cost too much time and money. This series of mountain hideouts works for shooting. This cave complex is an excellent place to kill monsters. When you play your typical mid-to-high-end video game, every area you come across has typically been designed for gameplay. But Larian – also the makers of Divinity: Original Sin 2, a seemingly bottomless role-playing sandbox – is a rare developer with the time and resources to create hundreds of hours of content that no individual player will ever see, accounting for all the different choices they may make.

Usually developers can only offer us a selection of curated options – this piece of dialogue or that, this route or the other – and must do a lot of work to make us as players feel like we are forging our own way. It is technologically impossible for a game’s systems to allow a player to do anything they want, but good lord, we’re getting closer.

Games are ill-equipped to replicate the spontaneity and creativity that arises from in-person role playing, or at least they have been. The studio wants to capture some of the unpredictable, anarchic spirit that players of real-life D&D adore about their hobby. It is indicative of Larian’s approach to the genre, which is that if the player can imagine it and it can be determined by a dice roll, you should be able to do it. You can be good, or creatively, grotesquely evil. You can try to steal almost anything, or throw it at an enemy as a makeshift weapon. It is the tip of the iceberg: you can romance pretty much any available character in this role-playing game, or several of them at once. But still, the scene inevitably went viral when Larian showed it off during a livestream last month. Look, technically it’s not a bear – it’s a shapeshifting druid in bear form. Depending on your level of engagement with Dungeon and Dragons-inspired RPGs, you will know it either as the unlikely and long-awaited follow-up to 2000’s Baldur’s Gate 2 – one of the great computer RPGs of its era – or as the game where you can have sex with a bear. This week brings a preposterously generous gift for lovers of timesink role-playing games: Larian Studios’s Baldur’s Gate 3.

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