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Same gender relationships clarifications?


elexier

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I was thinking ( I may be wrong though) that this "more info soon" was referring to the part of the statement that said they were planning for more SGR options in the future. My expectation would definitely be that if Makeb has only flirts, actual SGRAs would be implemented later, possibly with old/new companions, possibly with NPCs, depending on where they're going with SGRs in general. Anything less than that is not something I would be content with.

 

They're probably going to scrap SGRA's with companions because they're "really hard" and.... no, no that's just too bitter, even for me.

 

More SGR options in the future is probably just going to be throw-away [Flirt]s for a very, very long time. Particularly if they take heed of the thread in the Suggestion Box that states they need to balance PvP perfectly, finish PvE end-game for forever, add in Pazaak Racing and Bubble Chairs before they do any Story Content.

 

And haven't class stories been indefinitely scrapped? It's a pity that companions qualify as class content then (unless you buy them from the Cash Shop) :/

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They're probably going to scrap SGRA's with companions because they're "really hard" and.... no, no that's just too bitter, even for me.

Not if we're talking about new companions. ;) And I'm not sure they're really thinking about scrapping old ones, since they're rehauling them anywyay.

 

See? I'm playing good cop to your "bad" cop here. :p

Edited by Lent_San
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Not if we're talking about new companions. ;) And I'm not sure they're really thinking about scrapping old ones, since they're rehauling them anywyay.

 

See? I'm playing good cop to your "bad" cop here. :p

 

More like bitter-in-need-of-chocolate cop.

 

They're rehauling the companions? What, when, where and who? o.O

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More like bitter-in-need-of-chocolate cop.

They're rehauling the companions? What, when, where and who? o.O

Chocolato... yes, not too bad either. :p

Wasn't Hal Hood talking about how "rewriting stuff for some companions" was on their To-do-List? On Twitter? Like a week, ten days ago? Go read and tell me whether I got that wrong, I might have, not guaranteeing for anything here. :p

 

Gonna start watching a movie now while Corso and the gang are digging up some Underground Metal that for some reason costs tons of cash on the GTN and takes ages to get via missions. Well, I hope they have fun on their day out, at least. :rolleyes:

 

PS: Poor Bowdaar is moaning whenever I send him out. I think he doesn't like it....

Edited by Lent_San
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Chocolato... yes, not too bad either. :p

Wasn't Hal Hood talking about how "rewriting stuff for some companions" was on their To-do-List? On Twitter? Like a week, ten days ago? Go read and tell me whether I got that wrong, I might have, not guaranteeing for anything here. :p

 

I know that they are apparently re-doing Smuggler jokes for Chiss Smugglers, but whether or not they're re-doing the companions, I don't know.

 

Would be nice if they did, but like I said, unlikely. Unless Mr. Gonzalez wants to pitch in. Which he won't. Because he doesn't like me. Because I'm mean. And bitter.

 

But at least I have a Toffee Crisp McFlurry! :D

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Chocolato... yes, not too bad either. :p

Wasn't Hal Hood talking about how "rewriting stuff for some companions" was on their To-do-List? On Twitter? Like a week, ten days ago? Go read and tell me whether I got that wrong, I might have, not guaranteeing for anything here. :p

 

Not quite, he said that reworking old dialogue that doesn't work with certain species, like a republic Chiss saying "I know I don't look Chiss, even my parents were suprised" and "there's no way a Chiss would actually betray the Empire!" :p But one could make assumptions that if they went through that kind of dialogue that they might also work on companions. Just a guess, can't really quote Hall on that.

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I like how there's now this huge difference between the acronyms 'SGRA' and 'SGR' and which one is used for 'flirting' and which for 'romance' as if the 'A' is super important.

 

I figured the 'R' would be the key there.

 

SGR = romance

 

SGF = flirting

 

Perhaps we should suggest they use these acronyms in future, with "A" referring to those with companions?

 

I imagine it will only take them thirteen months to adopt the new system.

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I like how there's now this huge difference between the acronyms 'SGRA' and 'SGR' and which one is used for 'flirting' and which for 'romance' as if the 'A' is super important.

 

I figured the 'R' would be the key there.

 

SGR = romance

 

SGF = flirting

 

Actually SGR makes perfect sense to me as a catch all phrase for everything including flirting.

 

Flirting could be considered a romantic activity

 

The A of the SGRA acronym stands for Arcs, which would imply a story arc.

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I always took SGR to be all encompassing. Whether it be just flirts or an actual romance story arc with a storyline NPC or a NPC companion.

 

Not the full blown romance, but it's a start. You don't have to feel your character concept is limited. All it means is your character hasn't run into "the one" yet. Personally, I haven't seen a reason to believe BW won't either make a SGR companion or won't change up the current companions for SGR (which is what I hope for myself).

 

Another thing is this will allow BW to datamine just how many players take the SGR option. As this thread seems to think there's lots who want it, this will be seen, and then more likely to have BW go "It's popular, lets add to it"

 

It's a victory. It may not be a big victory. It may not be the victory you wanted. But it's a victory. Enjoy it for a bit, see where it goes, then come back to it.

 

This doesn't mean don't continue to ask, but I don't see why the doom and gloom unless you think it won't be popular for them run with.

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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:

I would only dismiss one of the smuggler's NPC romances as a 'throwaway flirt' and that's Skavak, because it is literally one flirt option and a kiss. But other than that there are three mini-romances (Lenn Teraan, Numen Brock and Lokir-Ka) which, sure, don't quite match up to a companion romance but still span the whole planet's quest chain, have varying degrees of story relevance and plenty of good interactions. They range from no-strings-attached (Lenn) to OH GOD MY HEART (Lokir-Ka). And then of course there's Darmas whose romance lasts the entire storyline and is arguably of more story relevance than any of companion romances I've yet seen, albeit without the happy ending.

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.

Edited by Torikae
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Not quite, he said that reworking old dialogue that doesn't work with certain species, like a republic Chiss saying "I know I don't look Chiss, even my parents were suprised" and "there's no way a Chiss would actually betray the Empire!" :p But one could make assumptions that if they went through that kind of dialogue that they might also work on companions. Just a guess, can't really quote Hall on that.
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.

 

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
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. :)
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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.

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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.)

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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.)

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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.
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.

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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.)

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... (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.

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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.

 

There are quite a few hang ups that the industry would have to get over, first (this seems appropriate) - I've not played ME, so I don't know how well they handle the differences of gender, but the fact that EDI is an AI that has a romance is interesting (and how it seemed to start before she received a body - she'd be an interesting study for gender presentation and reception, actually) - there was a thread in the Agent forums about romancing SCORPIO where we discussed the problems of AI and free will.

 

Ok, off-topic, but I still feel that this thread is a safe space for discussing topics which aren't all about cis- straight men all the time :rolleyes: At the very lest they're less likely to come here and start making it all about them.

 

Edit: Found the SCORPIO thread.

Edited by Tatile
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There are quite a few hang ups that the industry would have to get over, first (this seems appropriate) - I've not played ME, so I don't know how well they handle the differences of gender, but the fact that EDI is an AI that has a romance is interesting (and how it seemed to start before she received a body - she'd be an interesting study for gender presentation and reception, actually) - there was a thread in the Agent forums about romancing SCORPIO where we discussed the problems of AI and free will.

Ok, off-topic, but I still feel that this thread is a safe space for discussing topics which aren't all about cis- straight men all the time :rolleyes: At the very lest they're less likely to come here and start making it all about them.

Edit: Found the SCORPIO thread.

EDI is a great example, but Jeff "Joker", her lover, is a good example too. He has Lobstein syndrome, so he is really out of the ordinary himself and a great character, if I may add. ME has a penchant and talent for implementing characters that are believable and not the usual cis-male chars and sexy ladies you'd see elsewhere. Okay, the girls wear tight outfits at times, but there's also Jack, and Shepard himself turns out gay, bi or straight in the last part, whatever you, the player, see in him. I'd love if SWTOR could pull something like that off, but it's an MMO with restrictions on character development after all, so maybe a single-player game would be better for implementing transgender people and give them the representation that they should have in games.

 

It says something about Bioware that despite them disappointing me in the way they handled SGRs in SWTOR, I still trust them the most of all companies out there to handle that matter tastefully and not sensationalist, given they make up their minds about it in time.

Edited by Lent_San
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Okay, so we've arrived at the T in LGBT. Please tell me *how* this would be modeled in the game?

 

As in, no judgement here, but really what are you asking for and is this a good use of BioWare's resources?

 

- Arcada

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Okay, so we've arrived at the T in LGBT. Please tell me *how* this would be modeled in the game?

As in, no judgement here, but really what are you asking for and is this a good use of BioWare's resources?

- Arcada

 

Maybe you should actually read what we were talking about. We weren't asking for anything, merely pondering an idea.

 

I also love how everybody is so worried about Bioware's 'ressources' all the time, but only when it comes to LGBT stuff.

:rolleyes:

Edited by Lent_San
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Maybe you should actually read what we were talking about. We weren't asking for anything, merely pondering an idea.

 

Pondering an idea? The poster indicated that "[They'd] like to see representation...". I'm VERY interested in what they mean by that statement in terms of execution. Are we talking about a completely new gender class? Are we talking about removing the gender class and clothing restrictions? Are we talking about simple verbal/text acknowledgements of the existence of these groups and allowing each player to use their imagination with respect to their own (and other) characters?

 

I lack hostility on such matters, and I'm not going to apologize to anyone for jumping from pondering an idea to pondering an execution.

 

I also love how everybody is so worried about Bioware's 'ressources' all the time, but only when it comes to LGBT stuff. :rolleyes:

 

I worry about bioware's resources every time I go on the GTN and Cartel Market looking for decent gear for my Inquisitor or Shadow.

 

I do understand why you'd be paranoid about my motivations, but I really have none that are hostile in this regard. Although I suppose the creepy avatar to my left might bias someone as to my personality ;).

 

- Arcada

Edited by Nydus
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