38 years of gaming and a degree in critical literary theory give me enough experience to know exactly the kind of colour-by-numbers romance that has been shoe horned in to this game.
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire did the same thing and got the same reaction from me. It was more difficult to AVOID sleeping with everything that moved than anything else.
It is bad, cheap writing and lowers the quality of this game to a Danielle Steele novella.
It's on the game to prove my experiential expectations wrong, not the other way around.
Or even though you have so many titles that's how you liked to play the games. Never had problems avoiding romances in the games that made it possible when I was in the mood for navigating the story without any other focus than to get the quests done. But then I also played the romances to see if there were any repercussions in the end of the story (that's what I hope, that in the endgame the different options: no romance, romance this or that other companion bring to different outcomes) like in Dragon Ages.
In a more general answer, I don't get all the moral backlash for scenes that are up to the player to disclose, and about romances in general. Like those are forced down our throat, you're not interessed in romance? Don't get there.
Furthermore on what basis does anyone, on basis of personal preferences, decide how Larian spent resources? It's few days I'm playing the game and I love what I see, re started few times and found new things I've lost, to this moment the storytelling seems captivating, you have a lot of options on how to achieve the first main goal, the companions have their storylines that are intriguing. There are issues but the studio seems focused on resolving them and so on.
That is, good to have personal positions on things like romance, sex scenes and so on, but always to remember that they are just personal opinions and that the games are all made in a way that almost anykind of gameplay is satisfied.
