Larian didn't have to go there. No one asked them to. But they decided to spend resources on such scenes anyway.
Maybe it's a clever marketing plan. Most of the marketing / PFH was focused on sex and romance. So I guess that's what the majority of players are into in 2023. Maybe I'm old fashioned but I'd prefer solid gameplay over this video game cyber romance fluff any day. With or without animals, watching Larian's explicit sex scenes mostly just makes me embarrassed for them. It's game porn. For storytelling it would be more impactful to leave most things for player imagination.
Agreed. Through the whole EA I had like 20 playthrough and only did romance twice, one with Shadowheart and another with Wyll, because they had the least cringey dialogue lines. We live in the age of internet, a lot of people basically live online and forget what the human interaction between partners looks like. May be those are the target audience.