Do take into account (and perhaps this is me thinking in way-too-good faith) that maybe it's just written weird and instead means something like "you could be friendly with Halsin before but it would just result in less content and weird silence from him" or something like that. It's really so unbelievable to me I kind of think I've gotten it wrong, somehow. Weirder misunderstandings have happened before.
As for whether the boards are looked at or not, in theory they are. However they've stated they're only going to be working on bugfixes rather than story stuff now, past crossplay and camera mode- unsure if they'd count this as a bug or story-related.
We can hope it's a misunderstanding, but we only have the sentence they've written in patch 6 and there's only one way I can interpret that unfortunately. And misplaced romance and consent flags in dialogue for Halsin would fall under the bugs category I think. Very longstanding bugs at this point, but bugs nonetheless. So for now I'll stay hopeful that if Larian does pay attention to the forums, they will see this request for a targeted, small-scale hotfix that could fix a lot of issues people have with Halsin's romance behavior.
What intrigues me, It's been over a year now on various topics on this subject and Larian hasn't done anything about it all. Whether this was intentional or not, it managed to destroy the Shadowheart romance for me.
Well, if this was intentional, all that's left is disappointment.
I find that really surprising as well. The only thing I can think of is that Larian might only see the drama surrounding it and the unpleasant debates that come from it, rather than the simple core issue that's starting these debates possibly being actual bugs and wrong flags for Halsin's romance interactions with both the player and the player and their romantic partner.
Having read/skimmed through quite a few of these debates, I really feel that many people do not have a problem with how Halsin or other companions' interaction with him is written, but how the romance/sexual content surrounding Halsin is always active regardless of the player's rejection of his advances. If I personally sift through the romance related stuff to be able to talk to Halsin about quest related stuff and his views, I actually find quite interesting to have around as a character. But the fact that I have to sift through so much, that I have to ignore continuous flirtations before I am able to reject him, and then that I have to endure him trying to have sex with me (or me and the companion I'm romancing) multiple times after I had already rejected him, is so very very off-putting. Because of what I see as wrongly placed flags, we lose quite some insightful character content from Halsin and are just left with someone who doesn't understand no means no and I find that very sad.
If these are bugs that have been here over a year, wrongly placed or missing romance/consent flags for Halsin (which are really only needed for two companion banters and an encounter with the drow twins), then not recognizing and addressing that specific complaint and request for a fix has led to over a year of unnecessary toxic debates over many many tangentially related things when the problem would be easily explainable and fixable. And if Halsin's current romance/sexual behavior towards the player isn't bugged but by design, they could have addressed this in a news update over a year ago to stop those unnecessary debates when they were beginning to pop up.
The OP has already clearly stated that they want this thread to focus on things that seem inconsistent or counterintuitive and therefore could conceivably be bugs, which is not unreasonable given how complex the dialogue trees are and there have been and still are multiple other bugs with dialogues.
As the OP has requested, let’s not have this thread derailed by discussions of other elements of Halsin’s romance or how he interacts with other romance partners, or by importing drama and debates that are only tangentially relevant here.
Thank you, that's exactly what I'd like the focus to be on. I've seen in other threads that you and others put a lot of work into keeping things on topic and I'm really hoping that possible bugs can stay the focus and we can leave that kind of drama out of it. As you're a moderator here, do you maybe have an idea to what extent Larian looks at this forum and uses the suggestions and feedback forum for things like hotfixes?
