In my opinion, a lot of the immersion I get from a Role-playing game that includes romances is when they make the characters as close to a real person as they can. In real life, everyone has a sexuality, everyone has a preference and when a game gives certain characters certain preferences, I start to see them as believable characters. The "player-sexuality" aspect of this game kind of breaks that immersion for me in the sense that no one seems to have a gender/sexuality preference and every player character is appealing regardless of who they are.
I'm conflicted with this because on one hand, with games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age (using them as examples since they're pretty well known for their romances), your variables to what any of the companions find attractive are fairly limited. In Mass Effect it's just gender. In Dragon Age it's gender and, depending on which game you're playing, max. four races. In Baldur's Gate, the variables get up to three gender options and over a dozen races. I could see an npc preference implementation limited maybe to gender, but leaving race out of it. People would be mad even with this, of course, but it's the simplest way to implement romance limitations without locking, say, gnomes out of half of the romances. It does add immersion, like you said, though. I get both sides of the argument, and tend to lean towards preferring npc to have preferences, but not so much that the playersexuality gets on my nerves. At least not when I figure out what stops each romance in their tracks so that I don't get hit on by anyone but my romance pick of the day (I'm still trying to figure out how to stop Wyll from wanting to dance with me but that's it).
Originally Posted by vx_phoenix_vx
But when you get a line from Astarion when he's explaining a very personal aspect of his character and it includes taking sex slowly and that he'd prefer "no one think of him in a sexual way" for now, I have a hard time believing that character should be able to be polyamorous with anyone. It just feels like it goes against his character.
Okay so while I do have my own issues with Astarion and polyamory (namely him being too insecure in his relationship with Tav to be okay with sharing at this time), I do have to say that polyamory and sex are not the same thing, and saying someone shouldn't poly because they don't like sex is like saying someone shouldn't be in a relationship period because they don't like sex. You can be polyamorous and just hold someone's hand and maybe kiss them, no sex involved. Which is actually what you'd do in this relationship; you get hand holding and kisses and probably cuddles with Astarion, and sex with Halsin. You also get emotional comfort and closeness from both of them, which is what polyamory is really about -- emotion, not sex. I say this as someone who's poly, btw. It's just about loving more than one person at the same time, and a polycule can be so many things that assuming it's automatically a sexy threesome or something is... Well. It's a misconception. Astarion doesn't have to get involved with Halsin or sex if he doesn't want to.
That being said I do think Astarion shouldn't be in a polycule at the moment, but like I said, that's because he's painfully insecure about him and Tav, not because he's not polyamorous or because he's not into sex right now. I don't know why Larian thought he was a good option for this. Wyll would fit better because he's the only one who doesn't have any relationship/sex baggage hanging over his head (as far as I know correct me if I'm wrong), so he'd likely be most comfortable with a third party getting involved. Then again, Wyll just has such monogamy energy that that probably wouldn't work...
