Lucanis Dellamorte - Official Companion Thread [Spoilers]

That's not the point. Of course, Hissrad didn't view it as a romance but they are not asking about him but whether your Inquisitor had a relationship that they viewed as a romance.  It also seems to assume that when they speak  of romance they do mean hearts and flowers and lasting devotion.   What if the person playing it only viewed it as sex but they did class it as a romance?   Now, of course, they can't allow for every nuance of the relationship with the person but I've already pointed out how the outcome can also differ with Blackwall and with only one choice relative to your relationship with companions (whether romantic or not) severely limits the way they can portray it without negating your experience in game.

Take for example, the choices carrying over from DA2 to DAI if your romanced Anders.   Now if they had only taken into account the fact whether you romanced him or not, would not really reflect what happened.   As it is, he more equates to Solas because if you had been given only 3 choices to carry over, they would probably have been did you side with the mages or Templars and did you execute Anders or not?   That would probably have given them sufficient information to reflect the outcome of your choices with respect to him.   However, what about the rest of the companions?   If you didn't romance Isabella, would they have assumed she left and didn't come back?   What about Merrill and Fenris?   Would they assume that they were always loyal or would they interpret it differently depending on whom you supported at the end?   Presumably the former or they would have ended up dead.

Of course,  they neatly side-stepped that anyway by having the lover no longer with Hawke either in DAI and a fairly generic Q&A with Varric about what the other companions were doing.    Nevertheless, I believe they could be left out of the narrative he gives if they did not survive to the end of the game because there were sufficient choices in the Keep to reflect their fate.   Even so, the team effectively ignored our choices with Fenris when it came to green lighting the story in Blue Wraith and his attitude towards Hawke and his former allies.    You may recall I was not happy with that, particularly as I romanced Fenris, but then I thought the whole explanation why he was not with them in DAI was pretty lame too.     However, I had assumed that when Hawke returned to Kirkwall at the end of Trespasser, that Fenris (or whoever was their LI) would have been reunited with them.   Then the writer of the comic series justified Fenris' attitude because he assumed that Hawke would have been left in the Fade.  So, that made two assumptions that he made and Bioware agreed to that did not respect my choices in either game.    Yet it seems we are to understand that the comic series are pretty much canon.

This is why having such limited options in DAV does mean they either will have to assume a canon world state in order to speak of the companions in anything but very general terms or ignore them altogether.   In the case of the LI it would seem they have chosen a canon outcome for their relationship.  It is not a case that I need to see the companions but it is the fact that I can still feel part of the same world as I was in at end end of Trespasser if the Inquisitor or anyone else speaks about them.  That team was important to me in DAI in the same way as they want me to feel about the team in the Veilguard but the fact they have made so few choices available to me, suggests they just want me to forget them, let alone those from earlier games.