I have no issues with romance in RPGs if its done well, nor with sex scenes, but the important bit there is, "if it is done well." What I mean by this is, the advances by the characters need to feel "natural" for that character. The companions (like real people) should have sexual preferences and if a player falls outside of those preferences, it should be comparatively more difficult for a romance to occur than otherwise would be true. The original Baldur's Gate games did this very well incidentally, where Viconia for example would not romance an elf PC. Obviously, some people are more carefree about sex than others, but if a character is meant to be more carefree about sex, then it should come across in their character and the way romances in BG 3 are currently implemented just doesn't feel this way. I think the cutscenes in BG 3, are not actually the issue at all, the different companions clearly do have different preferences within them, the problem is, how you get there feels like its really poorly implemented and rather than feeling like a relationship which is being developed it feels like all the characters are player sexual. This to me, makes the characters much more shallow than they could otherwise be.
I don't think that anyone is saying that it shouldn't be done well.
I've criticized how the game just had all of the companions wanting to sleep with me suddenly at camp, but I also think that they're unfinished currently.
In regards to the sexual preferences thing I actually had that thought first as well but I think that ultimately it's about sorta making your own canon and having choices.
If you play as a heterosexual man for example and don't pursue Gale then your experience will essentially be that he's heterosexual especially with his other romance subplot. The issue is that like I said I think that it's unfinished currently and there's an inbetween missing.
Making everyone bi gameplay-wise does make some sense and opens the game up a lot.
But yeah, only character I pursued was Shadowheart but then everyone wanted to sleep with me because I was... Polite to them?
Yeah I don't think that's intended in the finished product.
I kinda do take a bit of an issue with the excessively high standards in regards to sex or anything sexual in game, but meanwhile no one ( or almost no one ) has any problem with gratuitous violence and gore.
So much of the violence and violent decisions can ultimately be said to be very shallow and being there for the sake of being there.
I also don't think that someone being carefree about sex is necessarily something that needs to be very clear in their personality.
A lot of people irl are very modest on the surface but then have multiple sexual partners and have sex very regularly vise versa.
Lae'Zel for example could really go either way but then you have people assuming that Shadowheart is literally some sexual sadist because she's a bit flirty at times.
Those assumptions to me are quite shallow too, it's why you have so many people who think that women '' are asking for it '' based on how they dress.
