Richard Cobett talks about Bioware’s continuing evolution of sex ‘n romance in their games:
With each game though, Bioware has gone out of its way to Do Better, and not always by heading down the obvious path. Dragon Age 2 for instance infamously made all of its romanceable characters (the entire party save for Varric and Aveline) bisexual so that any player would be able to get with anyone they wanted. Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect 3 reverses that approach, deciding that sexuality is an important part of the characters and that it can be as jarring for everyone you meet to be an option as to be politely refused. Some characters are still bisexual. Most now have their preferences, with Dragon Age expanding on gender to factor in species as well. Qunari especially seem limited in who they can give the horn.
From a Watsonian, in-game point of view I can understand this, but from a Doylian, gamer point of view I’d rather the gaming world did reshape itself around my romance preferences. One of the greatest disappointments coming to the Mass Effect series years after everybody else and hearing so much about the incredible romance options –some of which may have been sarcasm, in hindsight– was finding out that actually, my options as Femshep were either Kaidan, the Dullness that Walks Like A Man, or Liara, with no options to woo Garrus, let alone Ashley. From a game playing point of view, for games like this, I’d like the option to romance everybody, even if this doesn’t make that much sense from within the game world. I don’t want the game to decide for me who is and isn’t romanceable, just like I don’t want the game to do decide what I look like.
That’s the whole point of open world RPGs like the Dragon Ages, Mass Effects and Elder Scrolls after all, that freedom to create your own character within the larger storyline. Freedom of romance fits in with that.
And no, the idea that everybody you romance has to be bisexual if you can romance them in both your female and male persona is wrong, though an understandable error. It’s just that in one leg of the trousers of time Ashley happened to be gay, in another straight…
Sam Dodsworth
November 25, 2014 at 9:26 amKaidan was too dull to even be irritating, really, but picking him to sacrifice at the designated moment of Ethical Choice That Has A Real Effect On The Game(TM) felt pleasingly tidy. Not that Liara was much better – I thought I was making light conversation with my not very interesting staff and then suddenly the two of them were accusing me of trifling with their emotions and demanding I choose between them. Sadly, there were no dialogue options to make the comedy intentional.
The only character I actually wanted to romance – and I seem to be alone in this – was Wrex, who’s pretty much the archetype of a certain kind of romance novel character. Ah well.
I think the option to romance everybody is harder to write than it sounds, even for characters as wooden as Mass Effect’s. At worst, you’re going to end up with something like a John Varley novel, where sex is so inconsequential that you wonder why anybody bothers.