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Same gender relationships clarifications?


elexier

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Long time lurker here...

 

Let me just say how great it is to FINALLY have a response. I've been waiting in limbo for the longest time trying to decide if I should level my would-be main character (who would be gay) or work on another character until SGRA's are introduced. Now I can at least play and enjoy the game knowing for certain that they won't be coming for a while. At least not in the form that I desire.

 

That said, I'm still a little ticked off that they decided to wait until the year was over to inform us about this. Would it have really been so hard to say last year, "Hey, remember how we said SGRA's were coming this year? Unfortunately, it doesn't look like we're going to finish this content before that deadline." Overall, while I am happy that we do have an answer, this has to be an example of how NOT to communicate with your community. I sincerely hope that Bioware will learn from this and not make the same mistakes again. And not just with same-gendered romance but with any issue. Communication is key!

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I want SGRs as much as the next Star Wars obsessed lesbian (or is that lesbian obsessed star wars fan? hm), and I'm quite happy with this announcement. SGR NPC relationships is a good start.

 

I can't believe people are saying they would quit because of the lack of SGRs though, get a sense of perspective. Really, it makes life and SWTOR so much more enjoyable.

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Watch, it'll be Valentine's Day, if Makeb isn't the next patch. Wouldn't that be kinda nice?
It would certainly be quite fitting. We need some love here, finally. :)

 

They spoke words? With actual syllables? That didn't combine to form the phrase "No more information at this time."?

Brb I'm gonna wake up now.

Lol, yeah, I guess many of us are still in a kind of "...Huh?" state...

 

Wow, the State of the Game thread is highly interesting.

Popcorn anyone?

You know this is getting good. My popcorn is bacon flavored. ;)

No bacon for me please (< vegetarian), but there's nothing that goes better with your morning coffee than a really stupid fight in General about real life topics that aren't supposed to be discusssed, and fake outrage by people who didn't get what they wanted this time (as opposed to all the other times....:rolleyes:).

 

This is the first, and only, official statement posted to the official website saying that "yes, SGR will be in the game." That is a HUGE step forward and opens a door that was previously, locked, barred and sealed. No, this announcement is NOT everything I would have wanted, but it is still a hugely favorable development and one we should be glad to see.
I really am glad and agree with someone posting here that this is a door that now can never be closed again. Haters can hate all they want, but they can't make this go away now. They better get used to it while they still can. Not that I care, but you know...
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De-lurks again!

 

I have to admit my initial response was crushing dissapointment to be honest.

However I've caught up on the thread, taken an hour to think it over I refilled my glass to half full status again.

 

It's a start, gay in game is good and as someone else said once you open that door it can't be closed again.

I am happy that we finally got some kind of answer, heaven knows we worked hard enough for it.

 

It has clarified one thing for me at least. I'm not going to hold off on my JK, Trooper and Smuggler anymore. If they do retrofit sgr's into current companions I'm thinking it may take a while and frankly, I'm happy to reroll for my favourite romances. So..they can have my money for Makeb and I'll stay happy and positive.

I'm tired of just hanging around now I want to just get on and play even if it's still not quite how I'd like to.

 

We have hope at least after the long silence. Happy News Year folks :)

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I want SGRs as much as the next Star Wars obsessed lesbian (or is that lesbian obsessed star wars fan? hm), and I'm quite happy with this announcement. SGR NPC relationships is a good start.

 

I can't believe people are saying they would quit because of the lack of SGRs though, get a sense of perspective. Really, it makes life and SWTOR so much more enjoyable.

 

I said basically the same thing and got flack for it. :p

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Sadly for you (based solely on your sig lol), Corso would be highly unlikely imo. First, he does not seem to fit the mold; his boyishness is more of an "aw, shucks" country-boy type, not a bicurious type -- as demonstrated in his OGR behavior, as well. And with this romance, in particular, there would be a *lot* of work restructering the entire romance arc, rather than just flipping a gender switch. :p

 

I actually completely disagree. my first smuggler, my 'testy' back in beta, was male... and the minute Corso appeared my 'gaydar' went into overload. this has got nothing to do with that weird concept of 'bicurious' (so no 'I'm only gay for you' garbage) ... he may be the 'texan farm boy' stereotype to an extend, but I don't know if you've actually played his whole arc or not... the boy's got some past. he likes to treat women nice, and he's definitely waaaaay too nice in a OGRA, something I can't see him doing in a SGRA where he knows he doesn't have to be a 'hero' and 'protecting his lady' (which he already does even when you don't have a relationship with him as a female smuggler)

 

not forgetting to mention that he's still using that 'flirtly, sparkly smile' even when the smuggler is male, so yeah...

 

granted that's just my person opinion, but I'm pretty sure there's 'country boys' who are bisexual or gay, and as I said before I could see a relationship with a boy like Corso being way different depending on their gender (might just be personal experience but I'm not getting into that one. lol)

 

 

I also want to add: even if this wasn't planned, I'm pretty sure that BW is aware that a lot of folks really really enjoy Corso, more than the other male romancable companions, anyway (and seriously, if you want to go by 'stereotypes', I can say I'd be kinda bothered if the only guy made available for SGRA would be someone like Quinn)

 

on top of that, considering BW seems to have that route of giving at least one romance option per class/gender, I'd say the same was probably planned for a homosexual romance. and then Corso is the only option for a smuggler anyway (Bowdaar or Guss? really? eh yeah... Guss is like 13 and Bowdaar 300 :p)

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Reading the official post it said :

 

Secondly, I want to reveal today that we are adding SGR with some NPCs on Makeb and do intend on pursuing more SGR options in the future. More details to come!

 

As opposed to WITH Makeb. Sounds to me like it's Makeb only and not earlier.

 

Hope I'm wrong :rak_03:

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Reading the official post it said :

 

Secondly, I want to reveal today that we are adding SGR with some NPCs on Makeb and do intend on pursuing more SGR options in the future. More details to come!

 

As opposed to WITH Makeb. Sounds to me like it's Makeb only and not earlier.

 

Hope I'm wrong :rak_03:

 

My guess would be, not likely. Updating past content is such a way is, most of the time, just not worth it, as players tend to look forward and not back ie "But what can my level 50 do now?"

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I said basically the same thing and got flack for it. :p

 

To be fair, plenty of time for me to get flack for it yet.:rolleyes:

 

People are frustrated, and I understand it. I've been waiting twelve months to stick my tongue in REDACTEDs REDACTED. But when you consider the various implications, from media reaction to the fact they have to the voice actors and actresses back to do more lines, I'm not surprised it is taking them longer than we would like and yes communication could be better. But it doesn't make BW evil or SWTOR a bad game, and it isn't worth quitting over or abusing people who also want SGR. By all means flame the homophobes...

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So I've slept on it (sort of, since all the caffeine that I'm not supposed to have in the million lemsips I've drunk in the past two weeks have totally screwed up my already fragile sleep patterns), and while I'm still annoyed that it's taken a paid expansion to see any SGR interactions, I have to admit it is at least a step in the right direction.

 

The announcement does seem to indicate that they are working on integrating companion arcs, so I will remain cautiously optimistic on this front.

 

Plus it's amusing seeing the panic in the haters' (I loath that term but it'll do) eyes at the preposterous idea that somehow now playing ToR will give them 'the gay' hehe.

(Maybe we should remind them that if it wasn't for a gay man, they wouldn't be able to play on a computer in the first place? Alan Turing anyone?:cool: )

 

Plus it means I can finally play my cyborg Jk and hear Laura Baily's voice again :D

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Seeing some people freaking out over on general now that SGR has been reconfirmed, is disappointing, but not surprising in the least.

 

And it's not even companions, it's only NPC same-gender flirts.

 

I'm getting more and more 'suspicious' of bioware's reasoning behind it and my mind keeps driving back to 'they want to see reactions first and have people get used to it bit by bit' so they don't lose subscriptions over there (which is silly since I BET they would KEEP just as many subscriptions if this had been in-game right from the start)

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I'm getting more and more 'suspicious' of bioware's reasoning behind it and my mind keeps driving back to 'they want to see reactions first and have people get used to it bit by bit' so they don't lose subscriptions over there (which is silly since I BET they would KEEP just as many subscriptions if this had been in-game right from the start)

 

I'm getting annoyed with some people insinuating that Bioware was pressured into this. Way to start urban myths there.

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I'm getting annoyed with some people insinuating that Bioware was pressured into this. Way to start urban myths there.

 

Can't type much. Cut index finger cleaning the blades for the new Ninja blender we have.

 

Yeah, I've noticed that too. Not so much here, but in the other two threads in General at the moment. I guess some have choose to ignore the facts that it had been over 9 months said any official word was given; that it had been promised back in Beta; that if GLAAD thought it wasn't worth it, they wouldn't have gotten back to us.

 

A few others, but my finger is throbbing. :(

 

Edit: Last thing...again, why is it that people that hate this content the most can't stay away from the related threads? They seem to be hung up on SGRs almost as much as the community that wants them is. :rolleyes:

Edited by natashina
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I realize a lot of this has already been said by others, but I'll just post my perspective on it anyway...

 

There were indications that Kaidan was supposed to be romanceable by both male and female Shepards in Mass Effect 1 but was scrapped before launch. Dialogue was recorded by Mark Meer (the VA for male Shepard) which clearly showed romance with Kaidan was possible.

 

There has been an official statement on this, which is that they simply recorded every line of dialogue for both male and female Shepard. This is made evident by the presence of a normally inaccessible line where a male Shepard refers to himself as a woman.

 

The same applies to ME2's romances, as much as I would have loved a FemShep-Tali romance. I think Miranda would totally have worked as a romance option for FemShep in ME3, though... if she'd been available as a companion. (In ME2, Miranda was sort of obsessed with the idea of finding the ideal mate to go with her own "perfect" genetics, but by the end of the game she has received news that she is sterile, so if she really were bisexual she'd have no reason to only pursue men anymore.)

 

I was totally going to post this.... before you posted it! :p Kaidan is in fact my fav example of how presumeably straight companions can turn out to be bisexual later in the game and still make sense. <3

 

Back when people were still speculating about what homosexual love interests were going to be in ME3, and people were suggesting Ashley and Kaidan due to the previously mentioned duplicate lines, I recall making this argument: Liara's presence and interest in female Shepard in ME1 meant that Ashley was probably straight, while the fact that Kaidan had no way of knowing if male Shepard was interested in men back in ME1 (and thus might hesitate to show his own interest) made him a good candidate to be written as bisexual in ME3.

 

Now that's odd, considering there's twilek/human hybrids in TCW. Hmmm...

 

Last thing I read about that was they were actually regular Twi'lek children, but one of the people working on the book that refers to them as hybrids misinterpreted what was shown.

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I'm getting annoyed with some people insinuating that Bioware was pressured into this. Way to start urban myths there.

 

I don't know if I will excuse this with 'willfilly ignorant' (people claiming same gender romance has no place in star wars seems like another way of saying 'ew gay is icky' to me, only that people know if they flat out said this they would get their reply deleted)

 

not forgetting to mention that it is a freaking bioware game. argh! I'm more than a little annoyed by the whole 'it's not in just accept it' crowd. there are just certain things I have come to expect from a bioware game (same reason why I am not all that concered about lots of the npcs looking the same, female children having *****, every dungeon looking the same... this is also something 'typical bioware'... lawl)

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So in order to add s/s material to existing dialogs, they would have to go back, find a particular piece of dialog that's flagged as a flirt, and remove the "PC is male" or "PC is female" condition. That's it. Takes thirty seconds, and doesn't affect anything else in the game.

But how long does it take to do all that for every romance conversation choice, write new dialog, get all the voice actors back (taking into consideration each have their own schedules and could be busy, sick etc) then record all the dialog, implement it, test it, etc. etc. It is a lot more than just re-writing a bit of code and they have a lot on their plate already.

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Can't type much. Cut index finger cleaning the blades for the new Ninja blender we have.

 

Yeah, I've noticed that too. Not so much here, but in the other two threads in General at the moment. I guess some have choose to ignore the facts that it had been over 9 months said any official word was given; that it had been promised back in Beta; that if GLAAD thought it wasn't worth it, they wouldn't have gotten back to us.

 

A few others, but my finger is throbbing. :(

 

Edit: Last thing...again, why is it that people that hate this content the most can't stay away from the related threads? They seem to be hung up on SGRs almost as much as the community that wants them is. :rolleyes:

 

without turning this too much into 'real life issues', they do it for the same reason why they complain about 'too much gay' on tv and go all 'I'm not homophobic but I don't want my children exposed to it and I don't want to have it shoved in my face'... (and with the tv they use the same arguments... it's not 'realistic' to see so much gay, it's taking spots off if really important stuff...blah-dee-dah)

 

we can only hope that from now on bioware will present all new content 'equal'.

in 5 years from now i won't care about this first year of madness IF they deliever from now on. 5 years from now the playerbase will no longer freak out because they are used to it.

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But how long does it take to do all that for every romance conversation choice, write new dialog, get all the voice actors back (taking into consideration each have their own schedules and could be busy, sick etc) then record all the dialog, implement it, test it, etc. etc. It is a lot more than just re-writing a bit of code and they have a lot on their plate already.

 

...

 

-_-

 

Look, I know I have a tendency to wall-of-text, but that's the second time in two days I've been replied to by somebody who clearly didn't actually read my whole post, wherein I already addressed the thing they replied to me to say. Is it me? Am I unclear somehow? Do I need to start using colored text or something? :confused:

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Sorry, I worded that badly, I was trying to highlight what you were saying about it being more involved than just flipping flags by also raising examples outside coding. It didn't help that I deleted the other paragraph I mean't to quote either:

Now, this would probably add a fourth item to the UI in most cases, which I'm not sure the UI can support, which may be the biggest hurdle; to get around that you'd have to rewrite most of the scene, which would be a pain. The VA for the same-gender PC may not have recorded the line in the first place, so if you don't get them back, it would be silent; that also needs to be fixed. The line may say something really obviously gendered ("what's a nice girl like you doing in a cantina like this" from an NPC), in which case it needs to be rewritten and recorded again to use appropriate pronouns and descriptors. If there's an animation, like a kiss, included, there need to be four new animations to account for the fact that the four body types have their mouths in slightly different places between genders. So it is a more involved process than simply "flip the flags" implies.

 

Edit: The point I'm trying to make is that even if the coding is relatively simply, it is still quite an involved job and then you have script writing, actor/actress scheduling, sound recording and whatnot on top of it.

Edited by LadyDrusilla
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I want to address the whole email campaign mentality and why it happened for me this way.

 

You know, when I started this, I wasn't thinking of anything on a huge scale.

 

What I saw was a company that hadn't given even the smallest update to a content that was promised pre-launch for post launch. This was for content made in a large part with a minority group in mind. This had went on for over 8 months.

 

It truly bothered me that they were remaining so quiet. I couldn't understand it. Not even when a bunch of employees left the company, including everyone that had publicly stated about this was fired/left the company. Not even after the game was getting ready to go to F2P. Not after the Livestream either.

 

After the October article, I geninuely felt that they had misrepresented the part of the LGBT gamers that wanted SGR by talking about how inclusive EA/BW is with LGBT content, allowing the assumption that the content was already in ToR to be published, and yet didn't give us a word for nearly nine months at that point.

 

I don't think anyone read the correction notice down at the bottom. My final two straws were that article and the Livestream. They allowed certain assumptions to go to print while continuing to ignore the polite requests from the players. I got beyond angry and just determined to try to do something. I had no idea what that was.

 

 

It was another poster that told me that GLAAD had gotten involved with ToR in 2011 over this very issue. I was just thinking that maybe GLAAD would care if there was still no update on the content since March.

 

I'm serious, that's it. I wrote to them, unsure if they would respond. I know they are very busy and I wasn't certain if anything would come of it. But hey, I figured it wouldn't hurt. Worse case scenario is that they would have just deleted my message to them.

 

I started writing to the press at the same time, without telling them I went to GLAAD. I wanted to try to see if we could get an update about this from BW/EA if the press started talking about it. I did not want the press to know I had started to go to GLAAD also. I wanted them to simply bring visibility to the lack of an answer.

 

I honestly would have never dreamed that GLAAD would have done more than hit delete on my email. They didn't though, so here we are. I don't think writing GLAAD changed much except maybe get an answer going in the months before Makeb. I was worried for awhile that they were just going to spring it on the player base a couple of weeks before Makeb landed.

 

I started this on November 29th in search of an update. Just an update. I had no idea it would get this big.

 

That's my side of it, for what it's worth.

 

For any newcomers or lurkers, I can post the EA/Zynga article on request.

Edited by natashina
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Edit: Last thing...again, why is it that people that hate this content the most can't stay away from the related threads? They seem to be hung up on SGRs almost as much as the community that wants them is. :rolleyes:

Yeah, I know. :p It's like both ends of a magnet. Though I'd like to state that I could live without the "other side" being so childish about this at times, instead of just sucking it up and taking it like grown-ups.
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