DA: The Awakening - Interview @ Bitmob

Bitmob has talked to Fernado Melo about DA: Awakening. This has resulted in an article titled "No Time for Romance: A Dragon Age Awakenings Interview." The title reflects that there will be no romances in the expansion. Here's Fernando's thoughts on this: 

Bitmob: The sexual relationships in Origins were another polarizing feature -- are those going to make a return in Awakening? 

FM: They will not. It'll be interesting to see peoples' reactions to it, because it was by far one of the things they enjoyed. I think there was a real risk, though, of us trying to add romances in [that] would've felt tacked on. The story doesn't lend itself to it; when you play through it, you'll realize the pacing is very different from Origins, there's a real impetus to just get on and solve the problems at hand. The characters that you're playing with all have strong enough backgrounds that you would need to really invest a lot of time to turn those characters around into something that was romanceable.

Time will tell; I think that we'll definitely get called out on it, but I think it was one of things that was the right decision to make, rather than trying to shoehorn something in. We'll just have to keep evaluating it based on content-to-content. Some cases where it makes sense we'll absolutely do it, and where it doesn't, we won't.