Okay, my moderator hat is now off, but in the interest of trying to moderate this thread fairly, this will be my one and only post on this topic as a forum member. Much as I think it's an interesting, if potentially thorny, one.
like SH maybe not being willing to romance a cleric of Selune.
Personally, I'm a sucker for an enemies-to-lovers trope, so my first planned character to experience the SH romance is of course a cleric of Selune! I am not in favour of limiting romances by race/class/etc in BG3, though ideally if there is some specific story reason why a companion would have a prejudice against my character, I'd like the opportunity to confront, discuss and overcome that in dialogue. If that's too tricky, I'd rather be able to headcanon how reconciliations came about than just have romances ruled out by the game when chances are they'll be exactly the ones I want. (And yes I did love the potential for rivalmances in DA2
)
More generally, I agree with the folk here who think that playersexuality is the most pragmatic approach to maximising player choice with a limited number of romance options, and for me in a game like BG3 which puts so much focus on player agency and replayability, that seems the right thing to prioritise. In other games, I would possibly agree different choices about companion sexuality could make more sense. But the chances are that I'll play and replay BG3, and so I appreaciate that I'll have lots of flexibility to have different romances for my different PCs. I expect I'll try most of them with PCs of different genders in the end.
I do, though, agree it can be immersion-breaking for everyone to be hitting on our PCs. But I disagree that limiting who we can romance, or indeed defining player sexual preference up front, solves that problem. WotR does have characters with defined sexualities and my PC in my playthrough was bisexual, but it was still really weird when Lann, Daeran and Arushalae all started treating her as though they had something special when she'd only been friendly and reasonably helpful to them. I'm perfectly prepared to just ignore some of that weirdness as the price of giving me and other players choice, but I also think part of the trick of good romance writing in a cRPG is to mitigate it by using various tricks to hide the fact that all characters are romanceable in a specific playthrough, and that applies regardless of whether the game has companions with pre-defined sexual or other preferences.
And as for
all companions being playersexual limiting the stories we can tell, I guess I agree with that too. And I also agree that it's not necessary (and in fact would be undesirable) for every game to tell a story in which a companion's sexual orientation is important. And that where there are stories that writers want to tell that can't be done with a playersexual companion, then they still might be able to tell that story or something like it in the game by using non-companion NPCs. Again, I think Larian have made the right choice for BG3 by prioritising flexibility for players to engage in different romances, but I might have a different opinion about a different game.
