I would love to know this as well. I played a full Disfavored game in which I had max loyalty/favor with Barik, Graven Ashe, and the Disfavored. I never killed a single Disfavored enemy the whole game through, always expressed respect for Ashe, showed empathy to Barik, etc. Yet the romance seems blocked. My character gets Barik out of his armor, expresses interest in him, but when the bathing encounter comes up he says: "The armor was but one of the many things that separate us. Archon." I even tried replaying the whole sequence from the start of his personal quest and leaving him out of the party whenever the game would let me (as he disapproves of the effort to get him out of his armor as soon as Tunon forbids it), but this made no difference.
This is so hard to understand - the number of hoops I seem to need to jump through is nuts. Except for the fact that I've seen someone post the romance on YouTube, I'd think it's impossible. Why wouldn't this story branch be designed in a reasonably accessible manner?
I love the game, but it seems like the DLC just isn't of the same standard. I already had to reload several hours of progress twice in Bastard's Wound, once because of apparently doing quests in the "wrong" order or not realising some branches would open up if I talked to a particular not-previously-chatty NPC at a particular time, and another time because of examining murals before an NPC told me to do it. Do I just have to accept that they released this product unfinished and seem content to leave it that way, or is there some way I can actually play this romance?
To be honest, it's especially frustrating because I got the base game free on Twitch Prime and I loved it so much that I then went and bought the full version plus DLC, because there wasn't a way to just buy the DLC via Twitch. But the DLC is so buggy that I might as well have just enjoyed my free game. I saw all the bad reviews on Steam but went ahead anyway because I wanted more of this world and characters.