Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Sexual preference selector.

Just an idea to appease everyone and releave some of the issues people are having. Why not implement a sexual preference selector during character creation that will either focus or eliminate overly aggressive sexual advances from companion characters. A simple selector for either Gay, Straight, Bi or "Not Interested" that could be changed at any point in the game that would focus the "attention" of the companions would make game play a little more streamline and have less of a (creeper vibe). There's nothing more creepy than unwanted sexual advances and this game makes a lot of us feel uncomfortable having to try to avoid advances or conversation that leads to sexual advances never mind the advances that aren't even in our wheelhouse. No one wants to be uncomfortable in any situation and for lack of a better term the "hornyness" of the companions is pretty far into the creeper level. Your conversation starts as "hey how are you, I've been concerned" and the companion replies "let's go behind a rock and grease each other up". A lot of us are concerned more about killing monsters and adventuring than trying to avoid being sexualy harassed... I quite literally fear camp interactions with companions because of sexual harassment. I'm only about half way through act 1 (if that) and have tried to politely refuse advances which seems to have made the sexual harassment WORSE..
Just a thought....

I would be into it.

edit:
That said, I don't think it would affect the underlying issue - romance is companion content, and it touches more than just "romance". To remove romance from certain companion, would require alternative content that would cover relevant story archs, without aiming for a romantic relationship. And example of how it can get weird is Cyberpunk - a game where romanceable NPCs aren't player sexual, and will romance V only if they are the right gender. Works from a different side than what OP suggest, but it's pretty much the same principle. The issue is, that for the most part whenever you romance someone or not, it is the same content, it just doesn't end in a sex scene. Personally, I still found those weird, because they play out like romantic encounters - you just never get an option to seal the deal.

Making companions fully romancable and non-romancable would more or less require to create different content for each version. Which is not unthinkable - we do get only handful of companions.

Eh, romances continue being a bane of RPGs companion. If I want to play a bad dating sim, I will just buy one on steam.

That's one way to do it.
But much easier way is to actually follow golden rule of game development, when it comes to romances:
Let player to control it. Meaning NPC will NEVER attempt to hit on you first. It is always have to start with player flirting with NPC. And if player had - then NPC might get idea that player like him/her, and if NPC likes player back - might play along.

And on top of that make it DEAD OBVIOSE which dialog would be considered to be a flirt.

I don't like that as being clunky, but it does seem like this is something that should be possible in dialog. When Gale (and it's always Gale seemingly) flirts with me I should be able to tell him I'm not straight, which I should then be able to say "tell the others" or "don't tell the others" Either should signal the game to stop telling me who I find attractive while the first should also block romance attempts from other characters.

Funny, I would think a simple toggle switch in character creation to identify preferences on sexual disposition would be anything but "clunky". It would be no different then selecting your race or class... :-/

This suggestion has already been made over in https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=884112. Though as I've said there, I think we've had enough of discussion about sexuality in this context. This is a topic that puts a lot of people on edge, myself included, as it touches uncomfortably on real life issues and prejudices that have no place on these forums. There are valid points to make, but they have been made, and we don't need to go over the same difficult ground again and again and again.

Locking this thread to prevent duplicate discussion with the linked one.