I bring this up because after seeing how stretched the word budget was for DA:I with so many companions and so many romance options I have come the preference of, that i would rather have fewer companions with deeper stories than lots of companions with very shallow stories. Yet fewer companions has obvious issues.
One of the issues is that romances, specifically LGBT romances have to serve two functions. One they have to be representation and provide the ability for people to romance the gender they want. This creates a dynamic that can cause problems within the LGBT community. First if you use any kind of representation formula you need a lot of characters that are romanceable because lets face it the world is diverse in who likes inny bits and who likes dangly bits. The more characters you add or the more romances you add the more development cost. And companies always try to reduce costs, Bioware tried to do the no set sexuality in DA2 and that created a huge backlash as people claimed it implied that was making a statement that sexuality isn't fixed. Or people got mad because it made every companion bisexual. So while it gave people the ability to snog the gender they wanted it upset people who wanted games to be more representative of the world.
Perhaps the problem was trying to use romance options to do both duties. What if you had people that are part of the LGBT community but they are not romance options like your second in command, the engineer, or whomever. They just members of the crew who happen to be non straight and you only know about their sexuality because of conversations about loved ones. When someone talks about their wife or husband by using these gender specific titles you have just identified their sexuality without saying...
"Hey Protagonist just wanted to let you know I'm [blank]."
"Err.. thanks... I guess? I didn't ask and don't really care so why did you need to just out of the blue tell me your sexuality?"
If games just had LGBT characters to do the representation heavy lifting and then had 4 romance options all "bi" two women and two men to give players choice on what gender they snog. Would that be a workable model? It would allow the protagonist to be whatever they wanted in terms of sexuality and because non romanceable characters would have set sexualities of Lesbian, Gay, Bi and/or Trans we would see the game's space populated by divergent peoples without having to create so many romance options.
Just a thought. i mean it is really easy for me to say this ideas works as a straight man because lets face it in terms of representation and romance options I am not under represented so maybe i just miss something obvious because of my frame of reference. So from the LGBT perspective, not that you are the lone spokesperson for the LGBT community, does this work? Is it a viable solution to lower costs while still giving everyone the option to snog who they want yet also providing a more realistic representation of the variety of sexualities that people have?
I guess many of the NPCs we encountered could have been LGBT. There are many gay characters and bi characters throughout the series like Wade and Herren, Branka and Hespith, Empress Celene and her servant, Krem, etc. I think usually people care about the romance more because it gets the most attentions. I don't care much about set sexuality. What I want more is how many options in relation to each other. I know that gay audience is not the majority, but whenever people said that all-bi or half the cast are LGBT as unrealistic, what they really mean is they want more options for themselves or less options for LGBT. Most of the people who complain about all bi options in DA2 are not even LGBT, the gay and lesbian people were actually happy that they have more than one option to choose from. DA2's complain mostly from the straight guys, and in particular, it was toward Anders' hitting on them. If given a choice, I want set sexuality because of how they handle set sexuality. In most of the games with Bisexuals, all the bisexuals are straight but with exception, you can see that with Zevran, Iron Bull, MacCready, Kaidan, etc. This is why I said Bioware has never done bisexuals, especially males, correctly. They're just straight guys that mention cats all the time, and only talk about attraction toward you as the protagonist. If they're truly bisexuals and instead of playersexual, I would want to see more mention of guys from bisexual guys. I like your options, 4 bis with representations from different groups. They have that throughout the series. ME series mostly only has lesbian couples, but nothing stop them from having LGBT NPCs talking about their loved ones. We heard conversations about a wife cheating on her husband with Asari, Nyreen and Aria, so there are lesbian couples exist in the game, and it can be organically incorporate into the game. They just don't have to make a big deal about it like with Kren where Iron Bull lectures you about trans or Dorian with the gay storyline. It feels "forced" if you try to bring attention to the issues instead of just having characters just have casual conversations that may mention their status like with Cortez and his dead husband, although his story is being defined by it a bit too much. All I can remember from him is that he has a dead husband, but I would have the same problem if he had a dead wife as well. I think overall, I like the way they handle lesbian characters much better, Samantha talks about how she likes EDI's voice, give very subtle hints about her sexuality, same as Sera, she has talks with Iron Bull about girls and stuffs like that. There was never any gay angst. I hope we see more of gay characters in the same vein as lesbian characters.
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