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Same gender relationships clarifications?


elexier

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http://www.swtor.com/blog/economic-changes-patch-1.1.5

 

They can take the time to craft lore based community articles about freakin' speeder licenses and color crystals, but can't take 5 seconds to address the complete and total lack of same gender romance content. I find it harder and harder with each passing day to even take these folks (BW - Austin) seriously.

 

They have failed so miserably not only the GLBT portion of the player base but all of the player base that came here expecting a true Bioware game and not only in the exclusion of same gender romance/flirt content from the game but also in their handling of the issue over the last couple of months. It would be pretty funny if it wasn't so appalling.

Edited by Nozybidaj
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http://www.swtor.com/blog/economic-changes-patch-1.1.5

 

They can take the time to craft lore based community articles about freakin' speeder licenses and color crystals, but can't take 5 seconds to address the complete and total lack of same gender romance content.

Well, my hope is that with this 1.1.5 content already announced, it will not require elaboration in tomorrow's Community Q&A Blog post. So perhaps we will hear something.

 

Or at the very least the Dev Team has that many fewer excuses.

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Well, my hope is that with this 1.1.5 content already announced, it will not require elaboration in tomorrow's Community Q&A Blog post. So perhaps we will hear something.

 

Or at the very least the Dev Team has that many fewer excuses.

 

LOL well we all know the question isn't going to be answered, nor any excuses given. Just more silence.

 

I don't know if I'll be able to post to ask questions tomorrow or not, my account says 0 days left, though I don't know how long it has been that way. :p Someone make sure to ask how BW - Austin feels about having failed to live up to the BW Founders' expectations of what a Bioware game is.

Edited by Nozybidaj
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I have to wonder what it is that make people think a compromise of any kind is needed.

 

Romance is part of the game. No part of the storyline based aspects of the game is opt-out, the storylines have many branches some of which you will never see, but it all boils down to choice.

 

Now if romance was to be part of the game, it makes no sane sense in 2012 to put out an interactive medium with a "Gays need not apply" sign in the window. But that is the situation that we have, one that we have been assured will be remedied "post launch".

Well said. BioWare hasn't compromised on this aspect in their previous games; not a single one has a toggle for any of the relationships. I see no reason why TOR would be any different.

 

LOL well we all know the question isn't going to be answered, nor any excuses given. Just more silence.

Hey, since you're so good at seeing into the future, can you tell me my local lottery numbers? :p

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Hey, since you're so good at seeing into the future, can you tell me my local lottery numbers? :p

 

No, but I can tell you which ones WON'T be picked. Just tell me the numbers you are playing this week.

 

 

The lottery is a tax on people who can't do math.

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No, but I can tell you which ones WON'T be picked. Just tell me the numbers you are playing this week.

 

The lottery is a tax on people who can't do math.

It was just a joke; I don't even play the lottery. :D

 

As for the Q&A this week, we might get an answer, we might not. Good thing the update for 1.1.5 was posted after the Q&A closed, else it might have been flooded with questions about the stuff coming in the next patch. Anyway. If we get an answer, there will be great rejoicing, if we don't, well, that just means nothing has changed.

 

But I am glad that quite a few people have joined our conversation this week. If we have to post the same questions in next week's Q&A, now we'll have even more people doing that. And we have the quote to go with it. :)

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Anyway. If we get an answer, there will be great rejoicing, if we don't, well, that just means nothing has changed.

 

well, it will be another week without news... Three more and my sub runs out(not just for lack of same gender stuff). Still have some hopes for great rejoicing though :)

 

But I am glad that quite a few people have joined our conversation this week. If we have to post the same questions in next week's Q&A, now we'll have even more people doing that. And we have the quote to go with it. :)

 

I actually hadn't thought about incorporating the quote(s) into our next messages for that thread... might help :). In the end it is still up to bioware though...

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Should come up with a single question that everyone can copy paste for their question in the new Q&A. Something along the lines of:

 

With Bioware Co-Founder Ray Muzyka's recent interview comments that same gender romances are "part of the expectation of a Bioware game", what is the current status of this content being implemented into SW:TOR, how is it being implemented (either all new companions or including existing romance options), and what is the expected timetable for implementation?

 

You guys refine from there if you want. Having everyone post the same question may or may not help, who knows at this point.

 

 

If they can't give a simple "The same gender romances are/are not being worked on and will include all new/existing romances and we expect this in the next XX weeks/months/years." then there really is no hope.

Edited by Nozybidaj
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I think we may get more out of them if we don't ask for a time-table. I think that is info they cannot supply. But really, there ought not to be any good reason why they cannot tell us a good bit more than they have - unless absolutely nothing has been done since our last information in September, and I find that hard to believe.

 

Another recommendation is that we stay out of the Q&A discussion thread about tomorrow's blog post, except perhaps to say "I am disappointed that this subject has not been addressed," and pretty much leave it at that. Drama does our cause no good. Let the other people look like jerks when they flame these comments. That can only help.

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I think we may get more out of them if we don't ask for a time-table. I think that is info they cannot supply. But really, there ought not to be any good reason why they cannot tell us a good bit more than they have - unless absolutely nothing has been done since our last information in September, and I find that hard to believe.

 

Another recommendation is that we stay out of the Q&A discussion thread about tomorrow's blog post, except perhaps to say "I am disappointed that this subject has not been addressed," and pretty much leave it at that. Drama does our cause no good. Let the other people look like jerks when they flame these comments. That can only help.

 

In the end, I don't honestly think it makes a difference if we ask for a time table or not. I just thought it would be nice to show solidarity simply for the sake of doing so. :p Especially given the ammo we have to do it with this week. I still don't think they'll answer, but maybe seeing that quote from Ray will make them feel bad about it. :D

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Say what time of day does the Q&A Blog get posted? I might want to set an alarm so I don't miss a moment of being disappointed for another week.

 

It's usually not till late in the afternoon. Helps build up the suspense right before the let down. Helps build that real fiery raging kind of disappointment.

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Cancelled my subscription today. I've got 5 months or so left to play. I haven't even been inspired to play in weeks. I've got 2 characters at lvl 50 and I don't even want to play my others.

 

I do not enjoy PvP, so I don't partake in it. I enjoy crafting and right now it's crap. They're saying that 1.2 will bring a bunch of 'improvements' to it but it doesn't really help the fact that the end game daily grind is not fun and operations just aren't that great.

 

With no SGR's my characters (I joked with my friends) will be some of the few that never actually romanced anyone.

 

Oh well, like I said, I've got just over 5 months left. Maybe things will change. Maybe not.

 

On topic, SGR's should be treated the same as opposite gender relationships. No better no worse. I'm not going to ask for a 'toggle' on seeing PvP stuff, it is easily avoidable if one chooses to do so.

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In the end, I don't honestly think it makes a difference if we ask for a time table or not. I just thought it would be nice to show solidarity simply for the sake of doing so. :p Especially given the ammo we have to do it with this week. I still don't think they'll answer, but maybe seeing that quote from Ray will make them feel bad about it. :D

I'm not against a show of solidarity at all - that has been my aim all along in encouraging as many as have been willing to ask about same-gender content in the Q&A week after week.

 

I do wonder whether we will come across better as a group of individuals asking for the same thing each in our own ways, or as an obviously aligned cabal. I think the strategy is sound. I am questioning the tactics.

 

Now, there is no real secret that we do to an extent organize to address the Q&A here, but that is a perfectly valid endeavor which is a logical extension of this thread's purpose - to seek clarification on the inclusion of same-gender content. And we know the Q&A is a natural place to express this. People do exactly the same thing in other hot-topic threads.

 

But if we present ourselves as even more unified, we look less like a body of community members with the same concerns and more like the conspiracy we are accused of being, intent upon inflicting our fringe issue on everyone else at the expense of Ilum or framerate issues or advanced class respec or faction change or pick any other pet topic here.

 

Those kind of accusations will come in any case. I am just trying to find the best way of demonstrating that it is players of diverse ages, sexes, orientations &c. who are eager for news of this content. And in that regard, the more alike we post, the more alike we seem.

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It occurs to me that this would be less of an issue if there was a mechanism for player character courtship and partnering. I remember in Star Wars Galaxies you were able to do so by exchanging rings (For Rebel players the ring to use was the Rebel Signet Ring which had nice buffs and if you used it to marry someone it never took damage) (come to think of it I think you could actually marry two people if you wore a ring on each hand).

 

But the roleplay in this game is not really geared for player to player. They have these (very engaging!) story lines but we are a bit on the rails.

 

This game feels like a multiclass KOTOR 3 where someone can swoop in and kill your objective before you get there. Ofcourse KOTOR 3 would not have a subscription fee.

 

I have paid my sixty dollars entry fee and my continued subscription for the privilege of posting in these forums. But why was I given half a game?

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As for personality, morality and sexuality - what makes you think one is any more flexible or fluid than the other? Personality is actually one of the most stable features of the human mind. Self-defined sexuality can change so much based on life experience and growth. Neither are really comparable. Some people have the most rigid moral principles and attitudes you can imagine and they will not stray from their position even in the face of facts or overwhelming opposition.

 

The toggle is mechanically unnecessary, but technically challenging to implement, if it should be done well. What you are really asking is not just not to see flirt prompts, a consideration beyond what people who want SGRAs have right now, what you are asking is that the implementation be further delayed so a toggle can be built. This isn't a compromise - we have already been made to compromise by waiting for months, and who knows how much longer - this is asking for special treatment.

 

As far as personality is concerned, I would argue that there is a great deal of fluidity. If you subscribe to role theory, a person's behavior is very context-specific. You wouldn't behave the same way around your best friend as you would your grandmother, for example. We adapt our behaviors very much to suit our environment - what is appropriate at a frat party isn't so appropriate at Sunday dinner. While some traits are fairly stable, there's a great deal of flux as one develops.

 

Where morality comes into play, there's also a fair bit of ambiguity. If you've tried to play through entirely light or dark side, it's a real challenge not to gain at least a few points from the opposing faction, because some decisions fall well into the grey area. Good people sometimes do bad things, and bad people can do good as well. Principles are one thing, actions are another.

 

I agree with you that the way one defines their sexuality can change through their lifetime. People can change or experiment. For the most part, however, by the time they're well into adulthood, people have a fairly set preference (be it hetero, bi, or homosexual). I don't know too many people who (aside from kidding around) would say "You know, I'm really not into guys, but I'll make an exception in this case." People tend to find out what they like and go with that.

 

I don't think that implementing some means of gender preference would be hard at all. The game already does that based on the opposite gender of the player's character. So instead of automatically assigning your romance options based on your gender, it would instead ask you. I'm not a developer, but if they were working on implementing this new content, it doesn't seem like it would delay the release of that to allow a player choice.

Edited by AquaSky
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I do wonder whether we will come across better as a group of individuals asking for the same thing each in our own ways, or as an obviously aligned cabal. I think the strategy is sound. I am questioning the tactics.

 

How's that worked out for us the last 4 weeks? :p

 

I don't really care it was just a suggestion. Anyone that wants to copy/paste my question or tweak it to their liking feel free. Whatever you do use the quotes from Ray and Greg and link to the interview that was given.

 

I hope that at least one person on the BWAustin team cringes and fears for his job every time he sees those quotes and that interview linked if for nothing else than to assure me that there is a Karmic balance left in the universe counterbalancing how I feel every time I am presented with flirt options in game knowing I'll never see one I can use.

Edited by Nozybidaj
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It's actually not a US military thing, we say "Ma'am" to senior female members. If someone had said "Sir" to me when I was in the AF I'd have wondered what they were smoking to not realize I was a woman. Note: I'm really, really not doing this to be rude and I hope it doesn't come off that way.

 

Nah, no offense taken. :D It must be a local thing; I've heard male officers call female ones "Sir." I live right by BAF, but I've only run into officers off base. /shrug.

 

On to the topic at hand! (or at least one of the several)

 

 

 

That... would drive me bonkers. o.O Granted, this is the situation with Bowdaar on a smuggler (though you're not trying to romance him either) but for some reason it would throw me off if it was in a romance option companion.

 

Yeah, as much as the idea is intriguing, I'd rather have a companion that at least spoke Basic. While I can completely understand why some would want that as an option(lookin' at you, Blizz lovers :jawa_biggrin: ), it would kinda break the immersion for me if they didn't speak Basic.

 

As for toggles of any sort. I could -accept- one at character creation but I would think it very unnecessary. And if it existed it better be the most robust selection possible. If they're going to make people choose there had better be an option for straight, gay, bi, AND asexual. If it was just "You must be straight or gay" that would irritate the hell outta me.

 

I agree. I think that there IF is a toggle, it should have 4 options. That being said, however, I'm pretty opposed to the idea of a toggle. I'd just prefer to ignore it. It was easy for me to do with Wonderbread(aka Quinn), so ignoring flirts seems like no big deal. Personally, the only toggle I'd like is to shut off my ugly companion helms, but that's another day for another thread. ;)

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I don't think that implementing some means of gender preference would be hard at all. The game already does that based on the opposite gender of the player's character. So instead of automatically assigning your romance options based on your gender, it would instead ask you. I'm not a developer, but if they were working on implementing this new content, it doesn't seem like it would delay the release of that to allow a player choice.

 

Well you admit you are not a developer. What we have now is a gender awareness in NPCs which allow for any personal pronouns to be correct as well conversation trees on who can [Flirt] with who. From a developer's point of view the conversation trees are probably gender blind beyond the first branch where you can take a flirty response.

 

So what you propose is not as simple as flipping a switch somewhere in the computer bank. Each character's attributes are stored in some sort of database. Each of these takes a finite amount of space to store. If we were to tack on an orientation field in this database (which in some peoples preferences has 3 possible settings, some 4 but I imagine it can get even more complicated if we added things like "you like Twi'Leks but not Zabraks" but I digress at the least 3 different settings) So we have to have these definitions stored somewhere and then for each and every character and a field holding this value. Now I don't know how they have the character database on the backend optimized but the addition of an attribute may be handled elegantly on one case, on the other end of the spectrum, it could lead to all sorts of balancing issues and latency (doubtful, but worst case scenario) With the number of players times the number of characters this is no small amount of data to be added.

 

Then you have to add an orientation awareness into all NPCs (a software GAYDAR not even the Force could be so accurate) This would not be a substitute for gender awareness which is already there, but a whole other set of conditional statements to govern the availability of certain conversation trees. When nesting conditionals it does not become twice as complicated per nest it becomes exponentially more complicated per nest. This would likely introduce any number of bugs which all the people who come in this thread and complain that there are more important things to work on will come back to topics in the Story and Lore subboard where we are discussing romance and blame the whole new set of bugs on us.

 

Now I hope you see why it would be much simpler for NPCs to be orientation-blind and just flirt with anyone.

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Well you admit you are not a developer. What we have now is a gender awareness in NPCs which allow for any personal pronouns to be correct as well conversation trees on who can [Flirt] with who. From a developer's point of view the conversation trees are probably gender blind beyond the first branch where you can take a flirty response.

 

So what you propose is not as simple as flipping a switch somewhere in the computer bank. Each character's attributes are stored in some sort of database. Each of these takes a finite amount of space to store. If we were to tack on an orientation field in this database (which in some peoples preferences has 3 possible settings, some 4 but I imagine it can get even more complicated if we added things like "you like Twi'Leks but not Zabraks" but I digress at the least 3 different settings) So we have to have these definitions stored somewhere and then for each and every character and a field holding this value. Now I don't know how they have the character database on the backend optimized but the addition of an attribute may be handled elegantly on one case, on the other end of the spectrum, it could lead to all sorts of balancing issues and latency (doubtful, but worst case scenario) With the number of players times the number of characters this is no small amount of data to be added.

 

Then you have to add an orientation awareness into all NPCs (a software GAYDAR not even the Force could be so accurate) This would not be a substitute for gender awareness which is already there, but a whole other set of conditional statements to govern the availability of certain conversation trees. When nesting conditionals it does not become twice as complicated per nest it becomes exponentially more complicated per nest. This would likely introduce any number of bugs which all the people who come in this thread and complain that there are more important things to work on will come back to topics in the Story and Lore subboard where we are discussing romance and blame the whole new set of bugs on us.

 

Now I hope you see why it would be much simpler for NPCs to be orientation-blind and just flirt with anyone.

 

Ah yes, another QFT. :cool:

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Ah yes, another QFT. :cool:

 

I was just riffing on back of the envelope for that scenario. I am a programmer by trade, with 34 years experience (Its a bit of a cheat I wrote my first computer program when I was 6 years old) But you would be surprised at just how difficult what someone would think is an easy task is. Then there is the old trap of any good programmer of giving a customer exactly what they asked for instead of what they really wanted.

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Now I hope you see why it would be much simpler for NPCs to be orientation-blind and just flirt with anyone.

 

At the same time, without knowing exactly how the TOR dialogue mechanism works behind the scenes, all we can do is speculate as to the relative difficulty of allowing for orientation. Having a character that's heterosexual is the default as-is, so unless they're revamping the mechanics entirely, it shouldn't be difficult to opt for opposite gender flirts. I would think the more difficult proposition is opting exclusively for same-gender content, due to the pronoun issues and such.

 

Again, without being on the BW dev team, all of this is speculation anyhow.

Edited by AquaSky
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At the same time, without knowing exactly how the TOR dialogue mechanism works behind the scenes, all we can do is speculate as to the relative difficulty of allowing for orientation. Having a character that's heterosexual is the default as-is, so unless they're revamping the mechanics entirely, it shouldn't be difficult to opt for opposite gender flirts. I would think the more difficult proposition is opting exclusively for same-gender content, due to the pronoun issues and such.

While I obviously haven't worked with whatever dialogue system they use for TOR, I did apply for a BioWare writing job several years back. (If it had worked out, I'd probably be a writer on TOR, since the job was in Austin, go figure, eh?) To apply, I had to write dialogue in the NWN module creation program.

 

Writing dialogue in that thing could get ridiculously complicated. You could set flags for other interactions, check the PC's bags for items to trigger different conversations, so on and so forth. I can't speak for the devs, but if I was working with a similar system and someone told me I had to create a new kind of flag that would affect a significant number of conversations in the game, including the companions who probably have more dialogue per character than any other NPCs, well... My reaction would get censored in this forum to the point where no one would be able to figure out what I'd said, let's leave it at that. :D

 

My long-standing guess is that the currently existing companions will be made hero-sexual, because that requires the least work on the devs' part. I'm guessing that the current romance dialogues are set to trigger only if the PC's gender is marked as different from the companion's. Therefore, the dialogue-programming part of adding in the SGRs would be a simple task of having a similar set of dialogues set to trigger if the PC's gender matches the companion's.

 

Not that I'm discounting the amount of work that creating those dialogues would take, but...

 

That reminds me, think they are hiring?

As a matter of fact...

 

http://www.bioware.com/careers/austin

 

:D

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