The romance stuff is childish right now, as in immature. It's all masturbatory nonsense that breaks immersion.
Everyone waits until the same night to suddenly get horny.
And when they do all get horny, there's no sexual identity to go along with it. Nothing about your character matters to them, in terms of gender or race or class. It's not even remotely realistic.
They don't care that you raised them from the dead three times. They care more about a handful of conversational choices.
I would prefer a system that gradually allowed a relationship to build via conversation. A system that took into consideration travel time spent together. I would prefer the companions to have actual interests. If Gale is straight, then Gale should be straight. If Astarion is bisexual, then he should be bisexual. These things should be a part of the characters' identities. Built in, regardless of who the player character decides to play.
Additionally, I think it would be beneficial if some of the non-companion NPCs were romanceable. Just because a random tiefling or druid isn't traveling with you doesn't mean a relationship can't begin to form.
Just my opinion.
100% in agreement. I will repeat myself from another thread, the Pathfinder games handled companion relationships correctly, though I didn't bring up the romances in that game. Those games had zero approval system among the companions. If they ever disapproved with anything you did (or anyone else in the party, for that matter, which is something you'll see in spades in WotR), they would outright interject with interesting party banter, instead of the silent '____ disapproves' like most other RPGs would do.
(What did I mean by something you'll see in spades in WotR? There's some party banter that can potentially happen between 2-3 party members at once. In one notable case...)
(There is a companion named Ember who is generally super optimistic and preachy about the value of redemption. She does this to everyone, including demons, and it annoys most people in the party. Other beta testers have noticed that there are some party members who actually never have anything mean to say about her though - and the most interesting part is that regardless of everyone's actual alignments, the ones that respect her (or simply don't insult her because she's too much of an easy target or too oblivious in general) tend to be the same party members that are seen being assholes to everyone else. The most striking example is that you have a Lawful Good Paladin who insults her for being impractical and wasteful in her efforts to convince demons to renounce their violent ways, while the Lawful Evil but super practical Hellknight simply decided to accept her for what she is - because if she succeeds? Good. Makes his job a lot easier. If she fails? Nothing was really lost in the attempt. There are a lot of examples of this kind of nuance among the writing of the Pathfinder games.)
You could not romance everyone in Kingmaker either, everyone had their own preferences (and several companions had a different focus in life that made them uninterested in any kind of romance at all). Romancing a companion in Kingmaker was something you had to earn throughout the whole game by talking to them in downtime, finding common ground with them, and most progress was dependent on how you handle their personal arcs too. Hell, you could accidentally romance them, and they had the maturity to not act like it's the end of the world if you end up friendzoning them in the end.
Really, people tend to act like the writing of the Pathfinder games weren't anything special (probably centering on the subject matter most of all), but the actual
presentation of it is leagues ahead of most other modern cRPGs.
I remember someone on Reddit made a post praising BG3's writing for daring to have companions take the initiative in asking you out first, but I argue that it actually cheapens their characterization for them to all universally do it at the same point so early in the game. Making literally everyone romanceable also means that the community in the end will just default to only caring about the romances in many cases, with almost everything else about them being sidelined in comparison. You can kind of already see this happening with Astarion especially.
