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[Red by Full Metal Jacket]

http://www.ausgamers...ntation-bioware

 

From article:

 

 

"In a forthcoming AusGamers interview with Aussie expat and BioWare producer Cameron Lee, it was revealed the normally ambiguous approach to in-game romance in the realm of sexuality would be receiving a more specific option allowing for more complex relationships.

"The romances are more complex both in type of romances going forward and how you go through that romance," Lee explained to us. "The different types of sexual orientation of the different kinds of characters around you is also more complex than in previous games. I think there's going to be a lot more realistic... realistic... you know what I mean -- anyway, more engaging and more involved than in previous games. That's definitely the goal, and we are definitely going to go out there with some characters just being one sexual orientation. And that previously wasn't the case. The real world reflects that so we're going to make a game that reflects that as well."

Dragon Age has always been known as an open and ambiguous beast where sexuality is concerned, and romance will continue to play a major role, only in more complex form built from the real-world. Hopefully this speaks volumes of the evolution and maturity of the series where Inquisition is concerned.

 

We'll have more from Cameron Lee soon, so stay tuned."

 

 

 

Thoughts?  Personally, I cool with this.  It gives me more incentive to play different characters and classes.  I will never understand why some people refuse to play anything other that their gender choice.  You AREN'T the Inqusitior, you're just playing as him/her.

[Allan Schumacher]

Thoughts?  Personally, I cool with this.  It gives me more incentive to play different characters and classes.  I will never understand why some people refuse to play anything other that their gender choice.  You AREN'T the Inqusitior, you're just playing as him/her.

 

Just as a note, it IS possible that your failure to understand is something that may not be the other person's problem.  We all have our preferences and whatnot (since you've actually stated that you can't understand how I play games, since I have a heavy bias to play my own gender as well), and it's perfectly fine for someone to have that.

 

 

(Also attaching myself to this thread as I read it.  I've already removed some posts that come across as little more than incredulity at the mere prospect that someone may be disappointed).

 

 

EDIT: Because horribad English

[Allan Schumacher]

Though this will upset some players, it is more realistic.  Period.  I'm not against any sexual orientation, but not everyone you meet is going to be attracted to you.  I've been attracted to girls who turned out to be lesbians and I've had gay guys hit on me only to be disappointed when they learned that I was straight.  Not everyone swings both ways and the idea of "player-sexual" is incredibly unrealistic.  By that I mean, not everyone will be attracted to you just because you are attracted to them.

 

I don't consider this a valid complaint within the context of Dragon Age.  There were people that were not attracted to you in DA2 and turn you down (Varric and Aveline), yet most who support something like what Cameron suggests point to DA2 as being "the problem."

 

I notice Cameron's quote stutters when he says "realistic."  I have a feeling that it may not have been the word he was necessarily looking for, but while talking with someone may not have the easiest time determining the correct word (part of the reason why you likely won't see me doing in person interviews )

 

The reality is that romance in our games is inherently "unrealistic" because you're confined to what "Word of Writer" allows you to romance.  Really like that other person?  Tough, not an option.  That single person that is homosexual strike your fancy?  Well you better hope that the writers wrote romance content for them.

[Allan Schumacher]

It's called a roleplaying game for a reason.

 

Definitions of what is a roleplaying game, and what constitutes appropriate roleplaying, are not going to be productive.  I am not going to be keen on people telling other people how they should or should not behave in a roleplaying game.

[Allan Schumacher]

For me character sexualities never impact the immersion factor. They DO impact the fun factor.

 

Immersion for me is impacted by glitches, frame rate drop, loading screens, that sort of thing. I just still don't believe that a game like Dragon Age should ever do x,y or z because it happens to be more realistic on planet Earth.

 

I think an advantage of having sexualities is that it also allows us to be more representative of those personalities outside of exclusive romance content.

 

I understand this will be very disappointing for those that had their heart set on romancing specific people, and that this might not be possible, so I realize that it doesn't come without costs.

[Allan Schumacher]

Look, while I know that some folks are thrilled about the set sexualities, there is no need to be childish jackasses about the matter.

 

Quoting for effect.

 

I'm slowly catching up to the end of the thread so if you've posted stuff that could make me angry, consider this your Early Warning Radar....

[Allan Schumacher]

Really. Everyone pretty much complains about all the other lazy things in DA2 like the infamous cave, but when it comes to sex, apparently it's A-OK.

 

This is because, for people that liked it, they saw a positive out of it.  Not many people would see a positive out of the reused cave.

[Allan Schumacher]

However, sexuality in the Dragon Age has been portrayed in a very normal way. Women and men procreate, sexuality exists and gender expectations exist. To believe that everyone the player encounters has flexible sexuality which bends in the direction which the player fits destroys said world, the fact remains that some Thedosian people--just like real life--are gay, straight and bisexual.

 

To mock the "realism" shows ignorance of what someone means when talking about realism and serves little purpose.

 

Just as a note, I think that it is on the player if they find the game world is "destroyed" because the exceptionally small subset of characters that they happen to interact with in a romanceable way (which is already arbitrarily and artificially restricted) happen to be bisexual.

 

There are plenty of people, including myself, that do not find the game world destroyed by such a thing (though if you have seen my responses about this topic in the past, you'll know that initially I had reservations about it).

 

If it's a pure flukey foll of the dice that this happens and statistically unlikely, then so be it. But given we don't even have orientation demographics it's not really something that can be said with any sort of accuracy.

 

 

Because it isn't "everyone the player encounters."  It's the exceptionally small subset of people that are even willing to have a romance with you.  Which already bends the realm of any sort of believability if taken in a literal, world defining sort of way.

[Allan Schumacher]

These people clearly miss out on many games then starring set protagonists. Sucks to be them especially if they only play female characters due to the lack of female protagonists but "only male" players would also miss out on great games such as the recent Tomb Raider.

 

Context is important.

 

Yes, some of those people may miss out on games.  That doesn't mean they can't ask for content that they'd like in the game that helps it be appealing to them.

 

 

Even then, for example, I have a heavy, heavy bias to play as a male in games that let me choose and define my character (including sex/gender).  That said, I still play and enjoy the recent Tomb Raider game.

[Allan Schumacher]

Just as a heads up, I'm removing swaths of posts that are based on off topic tangents that tend to make references to posts that have already been removed.  Just as an FYI.

[Allan Schumacher]

Is this concept art or an in game snapshot?

 

In game.

[Allan Schumacher]

Returning to your roots is not always the best policy. Most countries used to own slaves, but don't anymore. Doesn't mean they should go back to doing so. I know that is a hyperbole, but it easily sends what I mean.

 

I wouldn't consider what we're doing in DAI to be a "return to BioWare's roots" either.

[Allan Schumacher]

I was about to joke that it made it easier to find your way around it, but then I remembered that I'm so bad at directions that I got lost in it several times anyway...

 

Hah!  I'm not sure that'd be the case, since the minmap still showed the full map

[Allan Schumacher]

Behavior (the part of personality we experience through interactions) can be strongly affected by the person's sexuality. As in, the same person can act differently towards different people, depending on whether they find the other person sexually attractive.

 

I understand what you are saying, but lets say we take a person that is homosexual and would respond a particular way to another man.  If we then make that person not a homosexual, would it be fair to say that they would respond to an equivalent woman without the influence of any societal expectations?

 

 

I can agree that it's trivial that if I were gay, I wouldn't see a woman the same way than if I were heterosexual and attracted to her.  Barring the sex of who receives my affection, why would I behave any differently if my experiences in life were not different up until that point?*

 

 

*Yes, I understand that people's experiences wouldn't be the same.  But I see that as an issue because if I were heterosexual I have an implicit acceptance most places I go, while if I were gay I would not and that would impose social influences on my behaviour.  I'll readily concede that social influences can affect my personality... where I'm confused is whether or not one's personality would be innately different based on their sexual orientation rather than the social influences that are a consequence of having that orientation.

[Allan Schumacher]

I'd find it destroyed if no-one interacts with the fact that my character is doing something which would be questionable for their position. I've argued this for countless times but I've always wanted the playersexual option to exist with the fact that the world reacts to your choices--although not financially feasible due to the fact that you'd need to develop twice the content.

 

I find the issues with things like Blood Magic and so forth to be significantly more world destroying than the romances playing out in similar ways for men and women.

 

As for wanting different reactions, that's an ask for more content, and it's an ask that I'd always expect people to make.  People always want more content.

[Allan Schumacher]

I was left feeling they indirectly stated that bisexual/pansexual companions (and people for that matter) don't have 3 dimensional personalities if they all happen to be in the same group.

 

Interesting.  I didn't see this at all, but I have my own biases (and loads of context people don't have).  Care to elaborate further?

[Allan Schumacher]

Allan I am mostly about technicalities. From an implementation perspective, which one would be much easier to implement between the two schools of romance systems?

 

Explicitly define which schools you mean (I think I know, but I want it stated simply because people may take what I say out of context).  The DA2 all bisexual model is one thing, while I'm assuming you mean 2/2/2 with 2 hetero/gay/bisexual?

[Allan Schumacher]

Hina feels (and I agree) that in this regard the romances are returning to it's Dragon Age roots of set romances.  And for some, including her and I, that's not a good thing.

 

While you're here, I did want to thank you for sticking around this thread.  I'm sure when it came up in the office that this information was going to be released this week, you drew the short straw and are dealing with us now. Or you are a masochist that loves his work and BW's fan too much and volunteered to play referee on the forums.

 

Or all of the above.  

 

It does mean a lot that you're trying to keep this thread open while we wail or celebrate this news.  Again, thank you.

I think it's safe to say I'm a masochist as I've only *almost* reached the end despite starting hours ago....

[Allan Schumacher]

Sure.   I had read earlier, in another article, that the reason why you guys decided to go set sexualities is to "flesh out the characters outside of romance."  So, a set sexuality is needed for this?  There can't be conversations about marriage, kids, even spouses of either gender without making their sexuality completely defined?

 

 It ended up feeling like, "If you're not within a totally defined sexuality, then you don't have enough personality on your own merit."  It's bad enough hearing folks talking about characters that become (or just are) pansexual "cheapened" by a change of sexuality.  It just felt like comments like that added fuel to those kind of fires.

 

Ah okay.  I can understand that.

 

Just in the interest of disclosure, I guess where the disconnect happens is with Cameron's comment "That's definitely the goal, and we are definitely going to go out there with some characters just being one sexual orientation."  Though, to me (who will stumble and bumble) I included "bisexual" as one sexual orientation when I read it.

 

I know sexuality is probably a bit more fluid than that (things like Kinsey Scale and whatnot), but I am hoping it's a prospect of having improved representation in the game beyond just the romances (which was something that came up when I asked people about what it was about the romances that made them so appealing).

 

 

Hopefully when the game is out and people have a chance to play it, it's not something that will be considered an overall negative (even if some people will still be disappointed because a character they really like may not be available to them).

[Allan Schumacher]

If your Inquisitor doesn't die, the ending cinematic is a giant Orlesan ball with Cullen served naked on a silver platter and everyone, um, digging in.

So all of them.

At once.

 

Evidently our game has been leaked somewhere...

[Allan Schumacher]

Sorry about that.

 

Your assumption is correct. How different is it to create a 2/2/2 model vs an all bisexual model?

 

Well, ignoring the big one (one has two more romances, which is a non trivial investment of time which I hope doesn't need too much explaining), I don't know if I would say that either is significantly more or less complicated/difficult.  For the bisexual lines, you're going to need to make subtle differences in lines due to pronouns, which is a check not only for IS_ROMANCED but also GENDER, and both games would have bisexual content.

 

For a non bisexual romance you only need to worry about the romance checks (though it's probably still not a bad idea to keep the gender checks in in case your design changes) past the original start of the romance.  So in this sense they are "simpler" and possibly less prone to bugs.  But it'll probably mean unique content for the cutscenes (i.e. different companions will have different contexts for their content) and stuff like that, beyond just the extra word count for the two extra characters.

 

Note that I'm not necessarily word of law on this.  Someone like David would be able to give more definitive answers, as I am only really exposed to systemic issues and don't really have the visibility on the full day to day challenges that both implementations may have.

[Allan Schumacher]

See, the thing is, Bioware just doesn't have the best track record for this.  They have made efforts, and the DA team, in particular, is very conscious of these issues, but honestly even Origins was unsatisfactory for me.  Two straight characters who have direct impact on the plot and two non-straight ones who don't?  Zevran implying that he only slept with men because it helped with his job as an assassin?  Zevran being the cliche flirty oversexed bisexual?  

 

I want to hope they'll handle this well.  I do.  I put a lot of faith in the DA team.  But Bioware's history, coupled with how this news was presented, makes me worried.

 

I think it's perfectly valid to have concerns.  There's still a looooong time (and it probably seems even longer for some) before release so hopefully between then and with news of the content at release, it's something that you can sit back and go "I'm okay with this."  We shall see I suppose :S

[Allan Schumacher]

Out of curiosity, can you give us any basic numbers? 2/2/2? 1/1/1? 2/1/6? 

 

Sadly nope!  TBH the only reason why I'm engaging in this thread is because Cameron's interview makes some things more confirmed, but otherwise I tend to let those with bigger responsibilities than I decide when/if to share stuff since I'm not privy to any sort of big picture.

 

That and I believe in the game and want people to enjoy it as much as possible.

[Allan Schumacher]

People said the same thing about the Human-Only Inquisitor.

 

Are you suggesting you'd like to see the game delayed another year?

[Allan Schumacher]

Because regardless of how you feel about sexual orientations, it's not common that you run into 9-12 people who all happen to be bisexual.  Maybe "unrealistic" isn't the right word, but it's certainly not typical of the people you would meet in real life.  You may have 9 or 12 awesomely badass friends, but I highly doubt that even half of them are the same sexual orientation.  One of the amazing aspects about people in general, is that two individuals can be vastly different from one another.  Like Samara said, "If there are three humans in a room, there will be six opinions."  The idea that the sexual orientation of that many people would be exactly the same strikes me as unlikely, even in the fantasy setting of Dragon Age.

 

I do not like the insistence that the party make up is incongruent with whatever people may happen to think is an acceptable distribution of sexual orientation and therefore that takes away from the game.  Forgive my bias, but doubly so because in my experience there'd be less of a concern if all the companions were hetereosexual.

 

Lets assume there's a straight up 1/3 1/3 1/3 split of heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual.  With 4 romanceable companions, that means that the odds of there being 4 love interests that are all of the same orientation is about 1%.  Which may seem like a small number... but it doesn't strike me as being frighteningly shocking.  Unlikely?  Sure.  So DA2 was unlikely then.  I'm still not really seeing the problem.  Note that this is the odds of them all being heterosexual and homosexual as well (does the number seem a little too small for heterosexuals for some people?  I wouldn't be surprised if it does).

 

Now, lets look at the probability of there being 2/1/1 (in whatever order).

 

Probability that the orientation of the first is one of the three is 1.

Probability that the orientation of the second one is NOT the same as the first is 2/3

Probability that the orientation of the third one is NOT either of the first two is 1/3

Probability of the 4th is irrelevant, so it's 1.

 

So the probability of each of the permutations is 21.8%.  Which isn't really super high individually.

 

Now, I know what you're thinking!  "But Allan, we can take different permutations and escalate that number."  And you're right.  So the odds of a nebulous defined 2/1/1 is only really useful if we are procedurally creating randomized orientations (which we're not).

 

So if we were to imagine a Dragon Age 2 that is, say:

 

2 people are bisexual

1 person is homosexual

1 person is heterosexual

 

There's only a 21.8% chance of that particular grouping actually occurring.  The problem is that people don't see this.  They see it as being equivalent to:

 

1 person is bisexual.

2 people are homosexual

1 person is heterosexual

 

and

 

1/1/2

 

But they're not.  In their mind their seeing the 65.3% and go "that's the way it should be based on probability."  But you're not getting nebulous 2/1/1.  You're getting a specific one, and with that comes a specific probability which is 21.8%.  Suddenly that specific match up you're given, while still more likely, is hardly "definitive."

 

So 0/0/4 (which is appealing because it's seen as universally fair) is about 1%.  We could have gone 2/2/0.  lets look at that.

 

Odds that first person is not bisexual is 2/3

Odds that second person is not the same orientation as first and not bisexual: 1/3

Odds that third person is not bisexual: 2/3

Odds that fourth person is not the same orientation as 3rd and not bisexual: 1/3

 

This is about 4.8% for the specific grouping that you see to actually exist from 4 mandated characters that you know will exist and could be potentially 1 of 3 equally distributed distributions.

 

(This last one I may have effed up on....  I may have gotten some conditional probabilities wrong in my head, but for the most part it's 50% of 2/3s which is 1/3 and it makes sense at 1:15 AM....)