Baldur's Gate 3's romances aren't the same old love song

gamedeveloper.com:

Spoilers for Baldur's Gate 3

"I've played porn games that were less horny than this," was my fiancée's verdict on Baldur's Gate 3 —and she meant this as a compliment. There are delectations that Baldur's Gate 3 cannot touch, of course (one has to look to titles like Ladykiller in a Bind for a particularly unsparing eroticism that finds both the joy and humor in kinky sex), but BG3 comes shockingly close for a AAA title pitched at a mass audience. It deserves its share of praise for depicting sexuality in ways that wax and wane from the amusingly sophomoric to the genuinely erotic to the delicate and tender. But more than even that, we now have a CRPG in the BioWare model that enables proper polyamory—without hacks, extremely esoteric or buggy play strategies, or mods. 

The fact that your custom character can get into a polycule with Shadowheart and Halsin is more than a little notable, after all. But beyond that, there's a critique that's started to emerge about this game's portrayal of its "romance options," and it's an argument that I thought had been dead and buried since around 2012: that characters have no defined sexuality, as such, but playersexuality . That they have no identity save whatever is most congenial for the fantasy of the player, and thus diminishing of any agency or independent identity of the non-player characters. 

But I'd contend that this is both untrue and that the game's portrayal of polyamory is a perfect case study in why.

I've always tried to be cautious about heaping uncritical praise on AAA titles for marginal originality while genuinely adventurous indie games often languish in penurious obscurity, of course. As I already suggested, BG3 is hardly unique