If you've been wondering why everyone in Baldur's Gate 3 is itching to jump your bones, it's because they've all been affected... with a mundane programming bug.
According to an interview with TheGamer, Baldur's Gate 3 game director Sven Vincke confirmed that romances were buggy at launch. This resulted in many characters confessing love and propositioning far sooner than they were supposed to. Vincke said, "The approval thresholds were too low when we shipped. That's why they were so horny in the beginning. It wasn't supposed to be that way. We've fixed it since, at least for some of them. We're still fixing a few of them."
Gale was the character most affected by the bug, according to Vincke. He said, "It wasn't intended, especially Gale. [He] wasn't supposed to be like, instantly there."
You didn't have to crunch the numbers to see that Baldur's Gate 3's companions were perhaps too horny. One Reddit post complained that "Romance is SO obnoxious in this game," while another described all the ridiculous (and spoiler-filled) bugs involving an all-too-lustful Gale. I believe I caught some of this in my own playthrough. Asterion propositioned my character on the very first night at camp, but then brutally proclaimed he would never sleep with her merely days later. Oh well; Shadowheart is my beau of choice anyway.
Some characters' horny levels have been repaired in the waves of ongoing patches and hotfixes, but more fixes are to come. If you are starting out on the PS5 version, or just starting the game today, most characters' approval markers should be back to normal. The latest big patch repaired many performance issues, added a new epilogue for the tiefling Barbarian Karlach, and targeted bugs in the unwieldy Act 3. The PS5 version will release on September 6, and an Xbox Series X|S version will arrive later this year. Larian has not announced as specific date for the Xbox release. All versions will have cross-save functionality.