A Call to Bioware: Please Unlock Hardened Lucanis' Romance (ACT 1 SPOILERS)

I just wanted to come back here and advocate again for some of this stuff, especially less "goody", "hardened" type romances (i.e. Lucanis)

I was just in BG3 and if you have played that game, there's a companion called Shadowheart. Not my favorite, didn't even expect to get her questline since I wasn't pursuing her this time. I almost always play a paladin class if I can, mage next choice if there is no paly. 

So, Paladin. And there's a mechanic where if you do something bad, you break your oath, so you have to be really careful if you want to be a good-aligned paladin. Well, I tried to psych out a goblin who was torturing someone, failed the roll, and this play through I am not doing any save scumming. None of the options were really good so I took the least "bad" one, just tweaking the torture rack of the prisoner a little. Welp, that was enough to break my oath. 

Went back to camp, couple scenes were queued up. Supported Shadowheart, or at least, didn't intervene, in a "bad" thing she wanted to do. Finished my oathbreaker "Oath", did a couple more long rests to finish up scenes and triggered her romance well, WELL before I expected to. My good-aligned paladins never got anywhere with her before at least act 2.

Done with long rests and the initial kiss scene, leave camp to go continue the adventure. Well, there's a question mark above her head because apparently right now, in the middle of a goblin camp, with a guy getting tortured and screaming in the background is the PERFECT time for her to tell me more about herself. that's a pretty long dialogue too, so about 3-5 minutes of learning about her backstory, her dreams, while some guy is getting tortured and our other two companions are standing awkwardly behind us somewhere. Some of this stuff can happen whenever affinity gets to a certain point so there's so much potential for absurdity like this. 

Now THAT is a romance. Freaking hilarious. Ten to one this is not going to end well on a dark path, but it's certainly going to be interesting. 

A romance with a Hardened Lucanis could be very dark, very bloody, very vengeful, and it's such a missed opportunity that they did absolutely nothing with it. He could have EASILY had two, maybe more paths, which would have made the game so replayable. 

Welp, time for Tav to head to the next room to get tortured herself, see if she can't get a goddess' blessing. 

Well, according to the AMA on Reddit today we may well need to kiss even this small hope goodbye. Apparently Lucanis is a very passionate individual who can't get past Rook abandoning Treviso, but his passions mean that he will still pursue Neve. It feels kind of insulting as a response, especially as he remains the only character who can get locked off in such a way (and holds Shadow Dragon Rook to an absurd double standard)

I hope modders have our back. 

Edit for a thought: he's so passionate that he can forgive the person responsible for his time in the Ossuary. He just can't forgive Rook for dividing their attention. 

OK, so I read that dumpster fire of a Q&A on Reddit.

Can I have those minutes of my life back now?

I just want to express how much I agree with this. As a Shadow Dragon Rook, I felt like saving Minrathous made sense and surely Lucanis would understand why Rook had to save her home. It was only after the dragon fight that I found out the romance was permenantly blocked. This makes no sense in my opinion. I really hope Bioware will listen and update this.

I think this is an excellent summation! I too, would like Lucanis to be equal to the other characters (or them equal to him). It also is weird that Harding talks about Taash to their mother, but we never see/hear anything about Rook. There are several of these little moments with some of the characters and makes it feel incomplete and disingenuous. Please please please flesh out these little missing gems!

Love the game, btw. Even with the characters lacking, I'm having a grand time.

P.S. What will keep me going back to Baldur's Gate 3 is that the characters feel so much more complete and their devs keep adding more to keep it interesting and flowing. This little FYI may not matter in the grand scheme of things, but if I have three hours to replay a game, I will probably be picking the game that feels more complete and satisfying interactions/relationships with the characters.

Why bother? It's not a real romance for Rook. Lucanis  very obviously was not originally a romance option for Rook. He was meant to romance Neve and was probably opened up for Rook as an afterthought or for marketing purposes. Problem is they forgot to rewrite him to actually show interest in Rook :) 

I would love to romance Lucanis, however I can't bare the thought of choosing Treviso with what would happen to Tevinter, or, more importantly, the Shadow Dragons (Viper in particular). Since Lucanis is coded the way he is, I'm stuck choosing a different romance interest since I can't stomach making a different choice. In DAO and DA2 we had the ability to either have Hardened or Rivalry romances, so I don't understand why they didn't do it that way this time. In Veilguard, they seem to have put more energy trying to be inclusive (which they should be inclusive) but at the cost of limiting factors on romances. It shouldn't be a swap out. They should have easily been able to obtain both. I'm having a really hard time wrapping my head around the decision to lock out Lucanis the way they did. This game was supposed to feature a main character (Rook) who didn't have anything extra special about them (unlike the other games), so why is Rook being held DIRECTLY responsible for the outcome of what happened to the city they didn't go to? I had my Rook send Davrin and Bellara to Treviso. A blighted Warden for pete's sake. A person directly tied to the blight, who can sense and fight darkspawn better than Rook ever could. Yet Treviso fell anyway, and because a single normal person like Rook didn't go, THAT'S why the darkspawn won. 🤦‍♀️ And my Rook doesn't even get the opportunity to be upset about any of it. Lucanis being locked out of romance is fine (it's not, but for the sake of peace we'll say it is), however if you choose not to help Neve instead, she's not locked out of a romance, it just takes a little longer. Blatant favoritism if you ask me. I get that Lucanis has a special "condition" and when his emotions get out of control, things can get rough, so that may have been the devs thought process on making him locked out, but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't make enough sense to justify it. I really hope they fix it in a patch soon. I'd really like to romance him without having to give up Minrathous (Viper ❤️🥲). Hell, I'd even pay extra if they want more money to add it in there, so long as they consider adding Viper as, at least, a secret/hidden romance option. 🥹 (**bleep** money grubbers! So long as you do what we ask, then take my money!)

Has anybody checked if the infamous "Lucanis has no time for a romance with you" notification still shows up upon returning from Minrathous in a playthrough where he and Neve have barely interacted?

Has anyone checked if BioWare has fixed this in recent patches?