Do BioWare game romances mean sex scenes?

You don't have to flirt with her to have her feed your fish. You can just be friends with her too. You just need to have dinner with her.

There are two paths with Yeoman Chambers: flirty and friendly. When she says she knows you'd catch her, you have three responses:
1. I'd drop you: Kelly will now be all business. No friendship there.
2. I'd catch you: You have started the friendship path with her.
3. I'd embrace you: You have started the flirty path with her.

If you pick 3, the next time you talk to her she even double checks if you meant to be flirty. She asks is she was too forward. At that point you can basically say you didn't mean to give her the wrong impression, and move back to the friend path.

If you talk to her often and aren't rude to her, at some point she will say she'd like to get to know you better. She has to be comfortable with you before she'd even mention such a thing. You are her commanding officer after all. At that point you can have dinner with her, on BOTH the friendly and flirty paths. What happens during dinner if implied by you. On the friendly path, obviously it was two friends enjoying conversation. On the flirty path... well, you tell me. What happened there is dependant on how your Shepard would approach things.

So if you have a friendship, you won't get flirt options, but she will confide in you her thoughts and feelings about people. Once you have dinner with her, she now feel comfortable enough to suggest entering your private quarters to feed your fish.

And even if you are on the flirty path and have dinner with her, that doesn't necessarily imply you were physical with her.

I'm really impressed with this forum thread. Well thought out yet conflicting views have been expressed with the discussion remaining civil, and I’ve found some great food for thought.

I have such mixed feelings when I hear the criticisms of Kelly not being flushed out as much as she should have been, or offense of her cabin dancing, or lack of a true romance scene. On one hand, it’s great that people care enough to want things different or to want more. On the other hand, she almost didn’t happen at all, so there’s more there than I had originally expected. I’ll let you in on a bit of ME2 development history.

ME2 was a very large scale project. Every department was heavily tasked to get a polished product out the door. Due to its nature, the Normandy came in a bit later than other levels. When it came time to flush out the Normandy’s light characters and plots, the writers and cinematic designers were fully tasked. There were discussions where Kelly (at least the part beyond “You have email” or “Such-and-such wants to speak to you”), Doctor Chakwas, Engineer Donnelly and Daniels, and Mess Sergeant Gardner were on the chopping block (and there were other characters that did get cut). In the end, a level designer did the writing for those characters, not a writer, and most of the cinematic design work for those characters was done afterhours by passionate cine designers. They were pretty much created after work hours as a labor of love by all involved.

From a development point of view, the real purpose for those light characters was to give meaning to the choice of going through the Omega-4 relay early or waiting. It was supposed to be something like the Ash/Kaidan choice in ME1. Do you save your Normandy crew but risk your squad mates and the entire mission, or do you prepare more but potentially sacrifice the crew. We kind of failed at this goal on two accounts. 1. That decision wasn’t clear. 2. We gave the ability to save everyone if you did the mission order just right. But the light crew members were there in an attempt to give you someone to care about. If you don’t like the flirty, optimistic yeoman, hopefully you like your old Doctor friend, or the joking engineers, or the brash cook. Hopefully there is at least one of those you care about to make the choice to go through the Omega-4 relay early a compelling one.

The light romance with Kelly was bonus. It would have been great to do the dinner in detail, but covering every type of relationship that Shepard might have with Kelly was just not feasible. Everyone has their own version in their head of what happened during that dinner, and you all are correct. To actually implement every version was just not possible, and even if there was development time that time would probably have been better spent flushing out your main squad members. Maybe the dinner shouldn’t have been in there at all then, but that’s a whole other discussion.

The cabin cuddles with Kelly and all the love interests, as well as her playful dancing, were all a last minute addition, done just a week before content lockdown. VO had been locked down long before, hence why they are all silent. Should they have even gone in? Once again, that’s a whole other discussion.

Anyway, I look forward to more of your thoughts. Thank you.