From there, there's been a lot of discussion about the potential for race/gender restrictions for characters, so prepare for wall o' text now!
Now since a few people said seeing an explanation post of mine helped, here's a link to that post, but I'll try to detail it out here again hopefully in a different way to hopefully help make things clearer.
Creating party interactions requires work in large part from writing as well as cinematics. I'm glossing over some of the dependencies (localization, QA, etc) but I think people can wrap their heads around the writing and cutscene creation.
In breaking down all the writing and cinematic work requirements, certain aspects get certain amounts of budgets. There's word budgets for the writers, and those get allocated in different ways. Light/ambient content has less dependencies (no need to set up a magnificent stage and cutscene) so the "cost per word" there is less. Cost in that "writers writing words here has less impact on the total amount of work for the cinematics guys." There's also gold content, which is "we want this to hit all sorts of emotional beats, it's a big part of the core game experience and so forth." Because of the nature of the work and how important we value it, words written here are "more expensive" because the downstream dependencies are higher. And there are things in between.
I'm not quite sure precisely where romance content lies on this spectrum, but it does have aspects that make it higher. And I'm not just talking about scenes of "sexy time" and whatnot. It can be direct interactions as part of the "core romance" (whether it be kissing/hugging or other sorts of interaction between the PC and the LI). There could also be scenes that occur in other places in the game where we have a bias to have your romance come up and talk as opposed to another character because we feel it's fitting. Just trying to illustrate that it may not just be as simple as "well make it fade to black." If your LI is distraught, for example, I think it's a better experience if your PC has the option to comfort them in a more appropriate way than just "I stand here and talk to you."
So knowing this, we can say "we think we can put about X zots towards content for the romance interests." In part of determining how much total work we can allocate, we'll look at how efficient the writing team can be at creating words (and dealing with iteration based upon rewrites that will happen based on feedback from the team and so forth). We'll also look at how quickly the cinematics team can be at creating scenes. Now, while I am (unfortunately) not as equipped to deal with the challenges the writers have had (I did a bit of support work, but usually through a fellow QA that worked more closely with them directly), I was working very closely with the programming team that was building and supporting the tools for the cinematics guys.
Part of the challenge is that with new technology, at the start we have to make estimates on the efficiency of cinematics because they're literally not able to create the content to shippable quality early in the project. So there's risks with these estimates (we try to be conservative), and there could be unexpected things that pop up (this affects the writers and their tools as well). Cinematics (and to some extent writing) are a significant dependency on other things such as character races, because content that shows well for a human may not work as well for a qunari.
So when the writers come up and say "we think this person would make an interesting romance arc," we'll have to look at how that impacts the cinematics work schedule. Lets assume we started with the realization we would need at least 4 LIs (since the team values providing choice, and we can do that with 4 characters). But writing goes "We have some interesting ideas for romances, and we also think there's value added in representation." Cinematics lets them know if they can handle this (like with, for example, a year long time extension) But in the throes of writing, some other characters come along and it's "I think this person would make a really interesting romance arc actually." Cinematics is consulted and goes "Hmmmm, this could be challenging...." So now we can look at it and go "Okay Cinematics is at capacity, but writing can make this work. Can we move shift around their existing work to make this work?" Sometimes it's "yeah, we can make this work actually." Or maybe it's "we only have the capacity to do half of the scenes." Then we can look at the cost of the scenes specifically and see what we can do with that. Maybe it means we take some scheduled scenes from other romances and allocate them here instead."
So I've gone on for a bit now, but this is what I am trying to point out when I say there will be less romances if we mandate that they're always bisexual so that people all have access to it. This means that last step in the previous paragraph is now writing saying "We have a great idea for an excellent romance arc" but now cinematics says "we only have capacity to do half the scenes. We can't do this for a bisexual romance." Which means now that that romance arc doesn't make it into the final game because even though writing was able to write it (and all the localization and QA downstream could support it), the cinematics guys weren't able to support the content. People that would like to romance that character now lose out.
Maaaaaaybe we can skirt around and make it minimalist, but I think that that is something that a fan goes "yeah yeah I'm okay with that" until they see it and compared to the other romances it's just not as developed. And people will be upset about that because the content they were looking forward to isn't as good as the content other people enjoyed.
Hopefully that can help provide a bit better understanding, especially when I say that "making it so romance can only be bisexual likely means less romance options being available."
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