I know we don't have all of the romance cutscenes yet, but I feel the need to make this now, before we get anymore, because this has been ticking away in my brain for a while now.
I've seen what we have so far of the romance scenes for the different characters, and of all of them the most complete one belongs to Minthara. It's not complete yet, I understand that, but even still it's... bad. Quite bad.
At the risk of outing myself as a freak, I'm just going to say I've played my share of ero games and greatly enjoy many of the NSFW works made in SFM, so maybe I'm just terribly snobby when it comes to my opinions on virtual dolls going smoosh against each other.
Lets get onto some of my issues with the scene:
Posing and camera work
This is not finished, that's pretty clear, but when the camera zooms in on a darkened tangle of limbs and your reaction is to squint and tilt your head because you can't really tell what is happening, or whose bits belong to who, that's not sexy. Add in to this that the characters do a lot of clipping with each other, a LOT of clipping, and it starts to get hard (HA) to follow what is going on and who is doing what. The camera cuts a lot, too fast I personally think, I get that it's trying to do a sort of flash cut of the two bodies intimately entwined, but the cuts happen too fast to get an impression of intimacy and passion.
Models and texture work
First, kudos for actually giving character models nipples. I know this is a low bar, but a lot of game companies never hit it, and realising that the hunky man the game is trying to throw at you has somehow misplaced his nipnops is very distracting. This also kind of links back up with camera work in my first point, because at a couple of points in the scene it became very obvious that the characters were... ahem. Smooth around the bend. And I'm just going to come out and say it; it looks stupid when Minthara tries to suck your invisible dick. The camera angle on that whole thing should probably be changed so she's mostly hidden and it becomes more about the implication than actually showing her fellating the air above your ken doll groin. Realising that your characters don't have naughty bits in a scene that is primarily about them using said naughty bits with each other really breaks any kind of sexy mood you were trying to make. And, before I forget; I really hope you are planning to add boob physics in the future, because those are some solid torpedo boobs, on busty characters it looks very silly.
Character motivation
Complaining about this here is like complaining about the lack of plot and character development in a porno, but I can't help it. Minthara gets set up in the beginning of this sequence as a stereotypical Drow dom, and then... proceeds to have perfectly vanilla non-dom intercourse with you? Not even a quick little face sit? And I'm not totally sure if the persuasion check is supposed to actually have an effect on how the scene progresses, in regards to who is in control, because it seemed to play out pretty much the same, and then suddenly end.
And that's it. So my suggestion for Larian is this: either go full ero and double down and give your characters their jiggly bits, or change it to a fade-to-black sequence, because otherwise if you stay at this level of half-ero, it's going to be awkward and unsatisfying. It's okay to have a fade-to-black. I don't expect fully rendered and animated intimate scenes in my mainstream rpgs. If Mass Effect taught us anything, it's that sometimes its better to fade out than have two dolls awkwardly grinding on each other; and if i wanted to see two smooth dolls awkwardly grind on each other, I can just play the Sims.
