This isn't Baldur's Gate 3. Avowed game won't feature romantic relationships - Obsidian

Players will not be able to engage in romantic relationships in RPG Avowed from Obsidian. Unlike Baldur's Gate 3, the developers of this game wanted to do romance "really, really, really right", or not do it at all - and that's exactly what happened.

In an interview with Windows Central, Obsidian's game director Carrie Patel confirmed that there will be no romantic relationships with companions in Avowed. Obsidian acknowledges that "this is something that many players like", but the company, it seems, did not decide to do it due to doubts about the implementation and scale of the game.

"We wanted to make sure that, if we included it, we had an equally significant non-romantic path. Given the amount we invested in our companions as characters who are truly tied to the central story in a way they weren't in many of our previous games, we wanted to make sure that if we were going to do romance, we were really, really, really going to do it right - or not at all."

Obsidian considered the possibility of implementing romantic relationships, but the final decision was to focus on other aspects of companions. This may speak to the difficulties with narrative implementation of romantic plotlines, as well as the decision not to do it for other reasons - but only Carrie Patel's words are known.

Also, Avowed will not have multiplayer. The game director praised Larian, the developer of Baldur's Gate 3, but said that the studio's goal was to create exactly the things that the Obsidian game audience expects - quality storytelling, meaningful choice and consequences, and the ability for the player's hero to change the world.