Originally Posted by Zenith
Originally Posted by mrfuji3
Originally Posted by Hilarian
I'll take lazy over discriminatory policy any day. The issue is that there hasn't been a single game developed that give equal attention to gay characters, it's also heavily one sided toward the straight players, which I already said to be expected as it's the majority of the players. In regard to your example, you have a bunch of choices already, so you just happen to stumble upon a gay character, you could just say that maybe you could go for them, but for the gay characters with limited options, you don't get to have that luxury. There were a big commotion with Mass Effect Andromeda because the options are as you said very LAZY for the gay options, both of the gay options are non companions, computer generated faces, with little contents. The supposed bi option was made for female, during the romantic scene, his eyes didn't look at the male character because he looks down to the height of the females, essentially a lazy mod where they just replace the female with male. There hasn't been a single single game out there that do set sexuality right. I would take lazy over intentionally unequal contents any day.

That's why there should be roughly ~equal number of options for any player preferences. We are expecting 8 companions, they can easily be:
1 straight male, 1 straight female, 1 gay male, 1 gay female
4 bi-/player-sexual companions of differing genders

This allows for everyone to have 3-6 romance options in any given playthrough, depending on their willingness to date companions of a gender they might not be attracted to IRL.
For comparison, 8 entirely playersexual companions results in 4-8 options depending on the same. Larian could make fully half of the companions attracted to a single gender and it would at worst reduce romance options down from 4 to 3.

Of course, companions shouldn't be defined entirely by their orientation. But all good companions should have defined preferences/desires/opinions, including about their sexuality. And their sexuality should preferably be consistent with their backstory/relationship history and any dialogue (flirting) between them and other companions.


The other constant thorn on the side is that rather conveniently, all resources go toward making the straight female love interest rather attractive in body and attitude, while often a fraction of the effort is spent in male models. If I could make a buck for every single well sculpted porn star female ass with super countoured armor while you get males with chicken legs and flat ass with baggy clothes, I'd be richer than Elon Musk.

Cora in Mass Effect Andromeda, and then Panam/Judy in CP2077.

At least in Baldur's Gate they actually gave the naked males some semblance of well distributed curvature, if we're going by the Astarion romance scenes.
Not just that, aren't the straight option is often the most important and plot relevant (on top of more contents usually) characters as well? Alistair and Morrigan from Dragon Age, Panam from Cyberpunk, the lords from Fire Emblem. The gay option in Mass Effect Andromeda is one of the most offensive things I have seen. See? I don't know if it's intentional or not, but the options for gay tend to be very out there.