Owlcat’s upcoming PC game Warhammer 40k Dark Heresy will include “crazy romances” and some “kinky stuff,” executive producer Anatoly Shestov told PCGamesN. However, he stressed the team wasn’t simply imitating Baldur’s Gate 3’s more notorious scenes.
Shestov said he has “like, 50 to 100 hours in Baldur’s Gate 3” and that the game helped shape Owlcat’s thinking about where to invest budget and design effort. “From my point of view, the main thing that differentiates Baldur’s Gate 3 from other games… is the sheer palette of ways that you could express yourself at any given time,” he told the interviewer.
He made it clear the studio isn’t copying specific moments. “It wasn’t even the sex with a bear, for fuck’s sake,” Shestov said. Instead, he described an appeal in giving players multiple agendas and voices to inhabit, and in using romance as one of several tools to drive character development. “Sex is just an achievement, but the whole idea of going under the skin, going deeper than you expected,” he added.
On how Owlcat approaches relationships, Shestov said the studio’s ideology does not reduce romance to a checklist. He described romances as a way to let particular characters evolve, and noted the team has strong narrative talent to deliver varied emotional paths. Dark Heresy will include those more adventurous romance options, Shestov confirmed. He said the team is “pretty open minded” and plans to keep their narrative approach consistent as development continues.
Dark Heresy’s romance choices will matter most to players who enjoy narrative depth and character-driven options, and they look likely to spark debate among fans of grimdark storytelling. Share your thoughts in the comments, and follow us on X and Bluesky.
