Did I hear this right?

In DA2, unlike other Bioware games, every romance companion was bi. It was stupid. Completely ignoring gender is exactly what they did.
The game reeked of cheapness and lazyness in every way (EA's influence no doubt), from the re-used areas, dumb battles (NPCs spawning from the buildings and even the sky to prolong battles), inventory items having the blandest icons ever, everybody in the world is bi, etc). It's exactly how NOT to do a game. I hope they've learned their lesson.

On the scale from 1 to 10 for priority. This is like 40 in importance.

Can not believe they are wasting time on developing this.

^ this

same goes for the time spent "fixing" companion gear colors and what not....give me some more warzones for pete sake.....grab any zone from any planet, cut the map in half, paste that half back on the other side so it is mirrored for republic spawn, and empire spawn...boom! new warzone map.

I doubt anything they add could possibly be that in-depth. They'll just disable the /gendercheck and be done with it. That's what I'd do at least...that's equality right?

We heard suggestions, and we do read the stuff, and let's talk a little about the stuff that we were not willing to do. We were not willing to go in and just change all the dialogue to work for the other gender. That is not writing. That is not good storytelling. When we do this, we want to do it right. We want to do it with the characters that it makes sense, that we always knew we actually wanted to do it for those.

PvP Czar Gabe Amatangelo mentioned in a video interview recently that he thinks that the Makeb patch will also bring SGRs (finally!) to the game. But he also says that he's about as far away from Story as a developer can get, and is uncertain of how accurate his scuttlebutt might be.

Any chance we can get this confirmed / denied, since it is half-leaked already?

EDIT - the interview remarks I mention can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Tt49...tu.be&t=10m49s

It will be about on par with what romances we have in game right now. Daniel Erickson addressed the point you raise last March, when it had already been kicking around on the thread in Story & Lore for a while. Here's what he said at the Guild Summit when the developer panel addressed SGRAs:

This came immediately after his explanation that the delay would be over the long lead-time required by writers to produce content. There really has been little doubt of their approach to this since. What there have been are questions we are still waiting to have clarified (which I am leaving to the Story and Lore thread, as this one was just to address the Makeb rumors) and worries that this went off-track with the changes at BioWare Austin and the shift in game direction in the months since.

To those saying other content should come first, look - it is coming first. It already has and new operations and warzones will be out before Makeb, and when it comes Makeb will bring much more than this rounding-out of companion character romances that has been planned for since pre-launch. That same-gender content is slated for inclusion has never been a secret. It shouldn't be a surprise.

I am not saying it is the most important thing ever. I was just asking whether certain new information – the only thing that a developer has said about SGRs since March – was official. People ask these kinds of questions about pending content all the time. Don't blow this up into something bigger than that. It's just a game.