Same gender relationships clarifications?

Given the angst about how BW could implement SGRAs, this may be a good time to resurrect Lent_san’s great idea about separating romances from class content: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=583335

For what it's worth, non-companion SGR could still be plenty more than 'just throwaway flirts'.
Taking the lady smuggler as an example since she gets my favourite NPC romances, and using a spoiler tag because vague smuggler spoilers: Anyway! Point is, if Makeb's SGR interactions match up to some of the 'better' non-companion romances in-game, they might not be so bad. I've no idea if they will! But I'm hoping...

Really, what I want is all of the romanceable companions available for either gender (surely they can't be oblivious to the fact that, given NO SGR romance options to date, a lot of us have inevitably ended up wanting our characters to romance the companions they've already formed relationships with?) But whatever, for now my point is: Makeb's SGRs MIGHT be more than just a flirt option or two. They might be nice mini romance stories. Might.

Oki... from the look of your spoiler-bit on the F!Smuggler... I'm missing out. Next one I play will have more fun in the galaxy. Thanks =)

Hoping for something like that for Makeb and SGR. That is is more than one encounter and a ftb.

Well, I know this is kind of a strawman thingy, but until they haven't ruled out the possibility that some old companions will be up for SGR at one point in time, I'd like to think that if re-writing of old companions is on their list anyway, the addition of SGR wouldn't be that much of a stretch, like you guys said. Whether they're gonna do it of course, we don't know yet but we should not shy away from letting them know we still think they should whenever the opportunity arises. It is, after all, a thing they led us to believe would be coming (Erickson), so if they're not gonna do it, they better let us know.

Well, it was more a groupwork, considering the comments people left that were great in addition. Feel free to add more to that thread, as I said before.

The good news is there's almost no 'rewriting' involved, pretty much the only thing you have to do is change a few pronouns here and there, its not like they're going to change 'i love you' to 'i love you, but you're a girl so I'm gonna need some more gifts before we make our relationship official', or anything like that. Having played countless mods over the years, I know for a fact that the romances work just fine regardless of your character's gender, so long as there's no gender check in the way of your getting to play them. Probably the changes they talked about needing to deal with in regard to the different species will take more time and effort than the changes needed to deal with the different genders. So its certainly something they can do all at once, and super quick, if they're telling the truth about being inclined to do so, which I certainly hope they are.

Ive read that other thread, and while the ideas aren't 'bad' per se, they're just overwhelmingly more complex and time consuming than is necessary, there's no way they're ever going to go to all that trouble to change the whole way the romance system works, nor quite frankly should they. The romance system works just fine right now, it doesn't need changing, aside from the whole gender check thing. If they did it like Skyrim and had no gender check preventions we'd have 10 really good romances to choose from instead of 0, that sounds like a pretty awesome system to me. To try to create an entirely new system, housing on various planets for various new and old LIs, etc. just to solve a problem that can be solved by vastly, VASTLY simpler means, its just pointless to even discuss something like that as a serious suggestion. For those that enjoy doing so, that's great and keep having fun doing it, but the best solution is the simplest, let us play the romances that are already in the game. Don't radically change them, don't limit us to one or two, etc. just let us play what we want to play, the same way they do it in Skyrim, DA2, DD, etc etc etc there's nothing remotely complicated about that. Suggestions that are incredibly complicated aren't suggestions any of us really need to make, let's just keep it simple, so we can all get what we want, everybody wins.

Well, from the statements we got last spring it would appear that rather than "rewriting" the existing romance arcs they're going to write entirely new ones. Because they had the idea that switching pronouns is lazy and unprofessional, despite that being more or less what's done in those other two BioWare franchises.

But, again, the writing shouldn't be the problem. The biggest hurdle should be paying all those voice actors to come back. That needs to happen even if they're just switching out some pronouns and most of the new dialogue is done with the core 16 voice actors. (Keep that in mind: to get one SGRA per class and gender, they'd need to work with a minimum of 32 voice actors.)

Perhaps they're currently looking at that stage, wondering if it's too hard or not? It's a little depressing to think that they'll drop the idea of SGRA's with current companions (whether applicable retroactively or post 50) in favour of another speeder - of course continuation of current romances post 50 is going to happen with updated class stories anyway, but apparently the OGRA's were easier in the first place (and cheaper somehow? I'd really like to see the logic behind that.)

Well, the suggestions weren't made to solve a problem, they were made for future content in general and didn't really differentiate between SGR and OGR. Maybe you misread.

I'm not a big believer in "things are so simple if we only remove gender check", so there we go. Can't see that working for quite a few of the existing chars. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

I can't really see a cis-male Inquisitor or Warrior being told that they'll need to go into confinement for several months (nor a transman, for that matter, as Bioware: Austin hasn't offered any support on that front either, though I hope it's something games will start to do.)

Definitely. I'd like to see representation of transgender people in games, eventually. Not sure if SWTOR is where it's gonna happen, seeing that they have trouble with SGRs alone, but the ME franchise would be great for that, imo.