[quote=Dagless]Animation are subcontracted. Doing less thirsty romance animations does not mean that someone at Larian now has nothing to do but that less money is paid to a other company where Larian ordered animations from.
I don’t know your source on that, but let’s assume this is true.
Then animations are the only thing that Larian could scale up quickly without getting into trouble with fixed allocated resources later on. It just required that the subcontractors spend more of their time on BG3 as opposed to their other projects.
So adding more romance scenes in patches may also be a business decision: they made vastly more money than they expected and now they spend that money where it does not risk problems later on when income from BG3 dries down and they are in production of their next game. Belgium is not a hire-and-fire country, and hire-and-fire goes deeply against the moral code of Swen (as he said clearly when he scolded other companies for that practice).
That is not the case. Even "romance" scenes must be planned, dialoge (before and after the scene) must be written, the lines recorded, the animation has to be recorded and has to got through post production which is rather lengthy compared to other animations because of the close interaction between characters and it must be tested.
It would have been far easier to add additional dialoge for underused characters or revise some of the more cringeworth dialogue (Viconia, Sarevok, Gortash, Cazador). Imo even an entire 3rd Emperor - Orpheus path would have been compareable in effort to adding more kissing and romance senses.
And while Belgium is not hire-and-fire, they too use outsourcing which the credits also confirm. So no, they did not have some animators and intimacy coordinators sitting around and had to be given a task. And even if, there would have been much more important things for them to do to increase the quality of the game than kissing scenes.
