It's all personal opinion and experience of course. Based on patch 6.
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Yes and no. I did the goblin fight and the defense of the grove fairly early in the game (talking of Minthara, deceiving her felt good!). Medium threshold is the best I could hope so early in game.
My drow has been rejected by Lae'zel and Astarion (and he had Medium approval with the latter and donated a bit of his blood; he had no illithid dreams or encountered the hunter at that point, though). Surprisingly, he did get an offer from Gale and Wyll (despite both being Neutral). However, my drow had quite the chemistry with Shadowheart from their first dialogues. And yes, you can fairly easy mess it up as the outcome from your "date" with SH depends on an insight check. It is at times confusing but I admit I did not find anything too unrealistic about it. Especially taking into account the amount of alcohol being spilled.
I do agree that that party should not be the only place where you can start a romance.
Yes, of course, we're all just sharing opinions here.
It's very true that if you deal with the goblins soon after getting the quest you probably won't get a lot of the companions past the required threshold. I do think an average RPG player will try to finish all the sidequests before proceeding with (what looks like) the main quest, so they'll have more opportunities to raise approval.
Astarion can be a little unintuitive. On Medium, he'll only agree to spend the night if he's the one making the offer. It's interesting that you got an offer from Gale, though. To my understanding, you can get him only if you resolve one of his camp scenes – the one where you cast a spell together – in a romantic way. Was the offer actionable?
Shadowheart's romance progression is probably the best in the game right now. You can flirt with her a little, it's not too overbearing, and the lowkey, relaxed romance scene feels like a natural progression of that. The player also has a lot of agency in how it can play out, and that's always good. Coming out to her, drinking the wine, and immediately leaving is pretty fun.
Nothing from this surprises me. Gale has quite the ego, Astarion is... well, Astarion
and Lae'zel is also very prideful.
My point might have run away from me, but the problem isn't that companions' responses are out of character, it's that their responses barely if at all change regardless of their level of approval.
Take Lae'zel for example. As you say, she's very prideful. In fact, she's so full of herself she views sex as a privilege she grants to you. It's perfectly in character for her to rub it in your face that you won't be sleeping with her tonight, whether she's interested or not. Except if you pick someone else, she'll say what a "pity" it is that she "can't lay claim" to her "proper trophy" even if your approval is low. She's disappointed she can't lay claim to you, yet rejects you if you ask. This, to me, indicates that this whole branch is meant to be romance-related, so what is it doing in a conversation with a version of Lae'zel who isn't interested?
You can see similar hiccups in all companions, and it makes it seem not like they're responding according to their character, but like Larian defaulted everyone to romantic lines to circumvent having to write dialogue variations, except for places where it can't be avoided. This romantic-by-default dialogue in turn makes it seem like everyone wants to jump your bones even if they don't. In my eyes, that's a problem, and I hope this is an EA-only thing.
