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Same gender relationships clarifications?


elexier

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I could see Darth Lachris (Balmorra) giving a SGR flirt. She seems far more attracted to power than anything else. Forget homosexuality or bisexuality, the Sith have got "power-sexuality," down to a science. :p

 

I agree with this, she definitely seems that way to me, as well.

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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

 

The same could have been said about Kaiden in the ME-Verse, and yet...

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Originally Posted by Jeff Hickman

Topic #4: Same Gender Romance: Any news on this front would be great…

Answer: First of all, I want to apologize that this is taking so long to get in the game. I realize that we promised SGR to you guys and that many of you believed that this would be with a companion character. Unfortunately, this will take a lot more work than we realized at the time and it (like some other pieces of content we talked about earlier in the year) has been delayed as we focused on the changes required to take the game Free-to-Play. As we have said in the past, allowing same gender romance is something we are very supportive of.

 

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!

 

What a completely underwhelming turn of events. These guys are running quite the clown show out there. So a few SG NPC flirts is the bone they are throwing us. Now they can legitimately claim "Horray look at us, we totally support the GLBT community. We are so awesome!" Without having to actually support the GLBT community.

 

Totally done with this game now.....

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The same could have been said about Kaiden in the ME-Verse, and yet...

 

I would not know, as I haven't yet tried out any of the MEs yet. However, I assume Kaiden was created to be SGRable? Corso does not seem to have been, and we *are* talking about BW-Austin, not BW-Edmonton (which is responsible for ME). Unless corso already had an entire SGR romance line built into the game, just not turned on, then it's unlikely that it would be rebuilt from the ground up at this point, just due to the costs involved and the severe downturn of the population since release limiting the ability to focus so many resources into rewriting one specific character's arcs.

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As an ally (I've no particular interest in playing SGRA content but believe it should be there on equal footing with OGR content), I am very happy that there is an announcement and a step taken forward. I suspect the technical/logistical reasons I cited back in November are more the cause of any delay far more than any perception that BW was ignoring or shunning anyone. I have long preferred the notion of taking one's time and getting it right than releasing shoddy work, and I hope that the content meets this quality standard because you folks deserve it.

 

Cheers!

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Need coffee and gonna get my DA:O on, but Lent, here's the quote you were referring to.
Exactly, thanks a lot for posting, that was the one. :)

 

The same could have been said about Kaiden in the ME-Verse, and yet...
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 Edited by Lent_San
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Now the fun part begins again: What NPCs in various planets do you think might give a SGR flirt? A real one; not like with cases such as the dancing girls or the "ladies" in Nar Shadaa.

 

I wouldn't mind a male dancer :D. Twi'lek slave girls and Leia-clones have had a monopoly on that market for too long, I say.

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Now the fun part begins again: What NPCs in various planets do you think might give a SGR flirt? A real one; not like with cases such as the dancing girls or the "ladies" in Nar Shadaa.

 

I could see Darth Lachris (Balmorra) giving a SGR flirt. She seems far more attracted to power than anything else. Forget homosexuality or bisexuality, the Sith have got "power-sexuality," down to a science. :p

 

That one cute guy on Balmorra in the Agent storyline. I forget his name, but he's super cute and very friendly and I would swap him for Kaliyo in a heartbeat.

 

That Welsh chap on the wall of Lord Grathan's estate. I'd show him my ergonomic chair.

 

And the one on Hoth with the snow tigers!

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Whoops, Nozy, I confused you with someone else, sorry for that. :p In case you read my post earlier. Damn those avatars. :o

 

I wouldn't mind a male dancer :D. Twi'lek slave girls and Leia-clones have had a monopoly on that market for too long, I say.
I tend to agree. :rolleyes:

 

...and I hope that the content meets this quality standard because you folks deserve it.

Cheers!

Thanks! Edited by Lent_San
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That one cute guy on Balmorra in the Agent storyline. I forget his name, but he's super cute and very friendly and I would swap him for Kaliyo in a heartbeat.

 

Sanju Pyne. *sigh* Female agents do get some mild flirt options with him.

 

Also, Aristocra Saganu on Hoth.

 

Those are the two npcs that made me wish rolled a female toon, lol.

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It's off topic, but I completely agree. The APAC servers need some help badly. Other than addressing SGRs, I wanted them to address the APAC server issues. Those poor players get tons of lip service and no real help. :( With my hours, most of my gaming friends over the years have been from NZ, Aussie Land or Across the Pond.

 

Meanwhile, on topic...yep, I'm still jazzed. :D

 

Now the fun part begins again: What NPCs in various planets do you think might give a SGR flirt? A real one; not like with cases such as the dancing girls or the "ladies" in Nar Shadaa.

 

I could see Darth Lachris (Balmorra) giving a SGR flirt. She seems far more attracted to power than anything else. Forget homosexuality or bisexuality, the Sith have got "power-sexuality," down to a science. :p

 

Oh and I'm still hoping for a Vette romance eventually. I still enjoy speculating on who might be available too.

 

Lady of Pain on Tatooine.

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That one cute guy on Balmorra in the Agent storyline. I forget his name, but he's super cute and very friendly and I would swap him for Kaliyo in a heartbeat.

 

Yes, Sanju Pyne! I levelled a femmeAgent and his mini-romance was quite adorable. And don't get me started on Aristocra Saganu. My current male Agent would be all over him. Literally. :D

 

I am really happy that we finally got an answer. It might not be the kind of answer a lot of us had hoped for (a tiny-itty-bitty part of me had hopes for at least a HK51-like (as in a companion for all classes) SGRable character...)

Wow, double-brackets... need more coffee, obviously.

 

I hope that this announcement wasn't just another blip on the radar, and that we will get more information about SGRs in a timely manner.

 

*goes back to bouncing around the room and squeeing like a lunatic*

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Don't mind him. He's always concerned for us and I'm sure he knows best.

 

Wow. I offered up a suggestion that gives what's asked for, could bring in money to TOR, and just adds new content period, and you come off with a comment that makes it sound like you're more interrested in winning some pc award.

 

Now, I don't know about every romance storyline out there, but I doubt there's some switch they can hit that says "okay SGR enabled"...ie, they don't have the scenes for it. And from what I've seen of the romance options so far, is at some point theres talk about having babies (again not sure about all)...and if that's the case with all of them, then that would have to be reworked/reworded.

 

On that note though, it's making me think all the races we can play are genetically compatible to have kids together. And thusly that question of mine is answered.

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I would not know, as I haven't yet tried out any of the MEs yet. However, I assume Kaiden was created to be SGRable? Corso does not seem to have been, and we *are* talking about BW-Austin, not BW-Edmonton (which is responsible for ME). Unless corso already had an entire SGR romance line built into the game, just not turned on, then it's unlikely that it would be rebuilt from the ground up at this point, just due to the costs involved and the severe downturn of the population since release limiting the ability to focus so many resources into rewriting one specific character's arcs.

 

Quite the contrary, Kaidan (have to correct myself here, it's an A, not an E) was created to be the exclusive male romance character available to FemSheps in Mass Effect. He's the quintessential male character through the first two games, but in ME3 if you set things up correctly, he will make a pass at a Male Shep.

 

You're thinking of Cortez or Traynor (both of which were masterfully done by the way) for characters meant solely as SGRs. As for Austin vs. Edmonton, I don't think it's a manpower issue, it's a time issue. If they're really committed to bringing SGRs in for companions (which Jeff's little snippet makes me considerably more certain of), it's then a question of how long it will take. Mechanically speaking, the reworks they're already going to have to do to accomodate max-level toons is going to dwarf the time needed for specific tweaks and rewrites.

Edited by Narien
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On that note though, it's making me think all the races we can play are genetically compatible to have kids together. And thusly that question of mine is answered.

 

Actually, there was a thread about this a while back, and several people cited examples of some of the romance letters where the companion specifically mentioned that their species were not compatible (Twi'leks apparently aren't compatible with humans, for instance).

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Exactly, thanks a lot for posting, that was the one. :)

 

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

 

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. A modded game can open up the dialog but it is not 100% perfect; characters will call your male Shepard "Ma'am", refer to him as 'her' and in the love scene towards the end, your maleShep turns female for a few seconds. However, when a modded ME1 file save is imported to ME2 or ME3, the game registers the same-gender romance with no further glitches.

 

I was hoping that when the Mass Effect trilogy was announced that Kaidan might finally be available to maleSheps for ME1 but alas, it was not so.

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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. A modded game can open up the dialog but it is not 100% perfect; characters will call your male Shepard "Ma'am", refer to him as 'her' and in the love scene towards the end, your maleShep turns female for a few seconds. However, when a modded ME1 file save is imported to ME2 or ME3, the game registers the same-gender romance with no further glitches.

 

I was hoping that when the Mass Effect trilogy was announced that Kaidan might finally be available to maleSheps for ME1 but alas, it was not so.

 

Ash and Miranda were both originally written as SGRs too, but they didn't make the cut either. There's also cut files from ME3 indicating Tali was an SGR at one point.

Edited by Narien
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Agree with Tatile and Noz.. Underwhelmed.

 

But... I do want to thank the team for finally addressing this issue. It should have been clarified a long time ago.

 

The quotes are again completely ambiguous. The tenses used and the phrasing itself can either compliment or contradict. I wouldn't read anything into it, it can be denied and changed at a later point.

 

Some thoughts. I'm glad we got a response. But I'm not excited about what's been said. I'm conflicted. I'll elaborate a bit on that.

While it doesn't say we're not going to be seeing SGR with companions, it doesn't say that we are either. In fact that line could be interpreted either way, which begs the question; have they even decided on it? Because to me it sounds like this (I'll use the "this" from the post, you know, the thing that shall not be named) has been decided to be put in very recently with some NPCs in Makeb.

But the fact that SGR will be in Makeb is a good first step. Making sure that in all new content SGR is available is a very big and good step in the right direction. We should then also expect any new companion(s) to be available for SGR as well.

They've not elaborated on what their promise exactly is and what is going to really happen going forward. It doesn't say whether or not previously released content will see SGR additions. That worries me. Especially since the future of class story content and companions is in a similar haze. So it equally says little about the future other than the NPCs mentioned for Makeb.

I'm conflicted also because what they've said, doesn't compute with their actions. And they can say all they want, but I want to see some action.

 

To me this doesn't fix the problem. The representation of LGBTQ people is still absent, up until Makeb. From Makeb there will be some, and that is a good thing, but it doesn't make the absence in the earlier content released right.

 

I've not been playing for that long because SGR isn't in the game. But I do wonder about some things. Perhaps some long time players can enlighten me. (Time to look at their actions, and not their talk.)

Obviously since release and since the initial statement that SGR would be added to the game, we've seen some content releases. With Makeb now seeming to be a point forward with inclusion, it begs the question, could they have been inclusive going forward a year ago?

Do Section X and Illum have NPCs that are exclusive? Have the additional planet quests been released post launch (they feel like content added later, and they have the most flirts with NPCs)?

What should they have been doing this past year? And I ask this, not because I want to burn them down with it now (it's already happened, no point in beating a dead horse), but because I'm curious about whether or not the gut feeling I have, that it has been decided later December to start being inclusive going forward, caries any validity.

What's happened this past year? I feel we need to process. Does this announcement that they are now adding SGR NPCs to Makeb, come only because we got really very angry these past few weeks?

What are their actual actions?

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RE: SoG2 Announcement:

 

Well, I thought I'd be angry at the information we were given (it's effectively pay2gay, since you won't get it without the expansion) - but... I'm actually fine with it. (More than fine, practically bouncing in my chair!)

 

I hope whatever they do with the NPCs on Makeb is at least comparable to the mini-friendship/romance available with Watcher Two for IAs.

 

This has made my day. :D

 

It's off topic, but I completely agree. The APAC servers need some help badly. Other than addressing SGRs, I wanted them to address the APAC server issues. Those poor players get tons of lip service and no real help. :( With my hours, most of my gaming friends over the years have been from NZ, Aussie Land or Across the Pond.

 

Speaking only for myself, I'm a little annoyed that Bioware didn't see this problem coming a mile off.

 

The problem is, since the local APAC servers weren't released until March at least some of the APAC population didn't move from US to APAC servers (because they were already settled and happy, with guilds and friends they didn't want to leave behind). Which just compounds our overall smaller population (APAC region is 1/10th the overall population of just North America).

Edited by Zandilar
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Regarding whether there would have been SGR content in the recent patches:

 

From what I gather, going by various things I've read over time - all of the content that we have in the game so far was essentially finished, or mostly finished before the game was released. They started working on Makeb very shortly after the game was launched. Also, we know from some early content patch leaks that 1.3 was supposed to be what we got out of 1.4 and even part some other patches that came after.

 

Here is what Daniel Erickson said regarding Makeb:

 

One of the first things we talked about way back in the day was that we wanted to make the eternal RPG. As soon as we started wrapping up any of the core content, we started making plans for the future. We then realized that people were burning through a lot of the core content. People were playing six or seven hour game sessions, and we were like, “We have to plan out all of our Ops and all of that stuff for the next year at least.” So we did that. All of that stuff for the next few Ops that people are going to see — you know we still have to build things, but all the core writing and the dialogue and the recording — all of that was written a long time ago. Then we started saying “What’s the next planet?” We looked back at everything we did well and not as well, and we realized that the best moments of our games from a storytelling perspective were definitely the early ones when it was more focused. You had fewer quests at one time, and they were much higher quality stuff, big high quality cinematics, really deep storytelling, big choices, stuff that you really, really were involved in, were excited about, and really could keep track of what you were doing. That is Makeb. Makeb is a return to full on AAA BioWare storytelling.

 

I have a feeling that the last time any voice recording sessions were done was last Spring. At least, that's the last time I ever recall hearing the VA's posting tweets about it.

Edited by chuixupu
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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. A modded game can open up the dialog but it is not 100% perfect; characters will call your male Shepard "Ma'am", refer to him as 'her' and in the love scene towards the end, your maleShep turns female for a few seconds. However, when a modded ME1 file save is imported to ME2 or ME3, the game registers the same-gender romance with no further glitches.

I was hoping that when the Mass Effect trilogy was announced that Kaidan might finally be available to maleSheps for ME1 but alas, it was not so.

I agree. I've read Kaidan was supposed to be bisexual from the start but they edited it out shortly before launch, the same with Ashley for femSheps, I believe. I've played the modded romance too, and there's still quite a bit of SGR content left in the first game.

 

BUT it was quite possible to play through ME1 and ME2 without those options and still find the romance between Shep and Kaidan to be convincing. Basically, the whole thing had the "You know, Shep, I've been thinking... " vibe and Kaidan revealing that he'd never been serious about other people in the past. He didn't explicitly mention that he'd been bisexual (or pansexual) all along, but it was what you gathered from his conversations with Shep.

 

I could see Corso in that same vein. You know, country boy, hasn't experienced much and now there's this whole new world to discover..... but we'll see. :p

Edited by Lent_San
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Ash and Kaidan were never intended to be S/S from the start. They were always straight.

 

Now, the way they did dialog in Mass Effect is to have both Meer and Hale read the entire scripts, rather than worrying about figuring out "ok this line is dudeShep only, this line is femShep only" during the actual recording sessions, and then sorted it all out later. I don't know why this was better for their pipeline but apparently it was; I believe them entirely on this count, because you can find unused dialog on the ME1 disks of Meer talking about being a woman.

 

At some point late in development, they noticed that hey, they had these active dialogs for both genders, and the Ash and Kaidan romances actually worked pretty well even with the gender they weren't. And they said, "well, what if we make all three love interests bisexual? That would be a pretty cool thing for our fans."

 

But they decided that it didn't quite work. Stop me if you've heard this one, but they didn't want to just flip the pronouns and call it a day. That wasn't good writing. A queer romance had to have its own separate dialog paths, and that late in development, there just wasn't time to ~do it justice.~ So bi Ash and Kaidan never happened because it wasn't planned. It was just an accidental near-miss.

 

(They almost have a point. Kaidan is a bit awkward because he's a Carth and thus compares you to his lost beloved ex, so there are three or four lines in the entire romance that would have needed reworking. Ash is completely, perfectly seamless, on the other hand, with only one line in the entire game that even needs a pronoun swap, much less an actual content rewrite. This is surprisingly common in BioWare games, as modders who made s/s Bastila and Morrigan mods easily but remained utterly confounded by s/s Carth and Alistair soon discovered.)

Edited by Quething
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Ash and Kaidan were never intended to be S/S from the start. They were always straight.

Ok, this is going way off topic, but this is inconsistent with what I've read and with what's in the game. My info is they scrapped SGRA before launch in fear of backlashes. Whatever. Back on topic now.

Edited by Lent_San
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Ok, this is going way off topic, but this is inconsistent with what I've read and with what's in the game. My info is they scrapped SGRA before launch in fear of backlashes. Whatever. Back on topic now.

 

Audio was recorded for SGRs for both Ash and Kaidan for ME. The romances were scrapped, but the files remained as part of the ME installation. Ditto for Miranda in ME2 and some FemShep lines regarding Tali in ME3.

 

I doubt they would have been included in the data that shipped, let alone recorded, had they not been in use at some point.

Edited by Narien
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