At this point Darth I think I'll just leave it up to people's reading comprehension skills to make up their own minds, as I am tired of you summarising my arguments into caricatures and dismissing them as bull****. Hopefully people can find something of value in both our perspectives.
I'm not saying they can't play the "you just assumed wrong" game but I am saying they'd have to be incredibly stupid because it's too obvious they created the perception and assumption which would most definitely qualify as deception. It comes down to what people expect and want and not delivering on desires and expectations they created themselves would be underhanded. Is that so hard to understand? You can describe any relationship as "interesting and potentially intimate" but unless it's clear that it's romantic it would be pointless. Oh the characters shared an interesting joke and they like both smiled and they depended on each other for so long to survive in battle so that's potentially intimate....sure....but the same could be said about the mindless shooty protagonists of Call Of Gears Warfare featuring Shooty McShooty so trying to make an argument that would in any way make a believable argument that there might be some romantic connection will leave people wondering what you've been smoking.
It's not my intention to smash your arguments into caricatures but I'm just not seeing how you could think Larian can try to pass an argument for "Well it's interesting and potentially intimate" in an attempt to excuse blatant lack of romance without sounding like they're pulling at straws in an attempt to deceive and excuse their failure to deliver on something they made out to be a very important feature. The perfect example that comes to mind is BioWare promising great variety of endings that took player choices seriously in Mass Effect 3 and then turning around and trying to excuse the absence of those as "artistic vision" and trying to twist arguments about how our choices technically mattered and how it's all about the journey, not the destination and on and on and on.....but none of that for one second excused the fact that they promised something to the point it became an absolutely central reason to buy the game and then delivered the complete opposite. People were looking at them like....are you f****** kidding me? They expect us to accept arguments of "artistic vision", "artistic integrity" and technical shenanigans as excuses? That IS bull**** and I'm sorry if you're feeling offended but there really is no better way to put it than bull****.
