Arouet

You mean, like, like Dwarves romancing Elves? Or, like, exchanging emotion-filled embraces with that attractive Monk? Or Engaging in playful flirtations with your party's Sorcerer while exploring ancient haunted crypts filled with deadly traps and flesh-rotting Ghasts who want to feast on your bones? Romances don't *fit* in games like these. They are thematically at odds. THAT is why people are ditching them on principle. I do not think there is anything about this setting that "thematically" demands celibacy, particularly if the developers have expressed their intent to "delve into a more mature subject matter." If they just don't have the time to extensively write romances, fine. That's a good reason. But as for the general distate for writing romances, c'mon. CA admitted that he's fueled by what he hates about a genre or a setting to play around with it. This is a perfect target for him.

Honestly, I could care less about the gameplay. I backed a possible successor to PS:T, KOTOR2, and Mask of the Betrayer. I expect wierdness and intellectual depth and a story that's actually about something. You can do what you want with the gameplay.

I'm going to say that it's stupid to throw out romances just because there's been a hurricane of games with poorly written romances that look like they've been put in out of a sense of obligation. Games are full of poorly written women, does this mean the correct choice is to not put women in your well written games? Romance and courtship are parts of living. A well written one is a wonderful tool for luring the player into accepting the story as real to them by giving the characters feelings and putting them in situations that the player can empathize and identify with. This is not wish fufillment - it's quite the opposite. It's making characters (and by extension, the whole setting) real by making them do things that really happen in real life. Ditching them on principle is not an act of maturity.