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Ayree

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About Ayree

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  1. Not all of us gayfolk would write a world where everyone humps everyone. I personally prefer Robert E. Howard's take on things. And I believe the movie Osvir spoke about was Caligula.. but that may be because, for reasons that are obvious to those that have seen it, the only non-comedy movie I've seen that's set in Roman times.
  2. You seem to have an issue with gay Romance options in any particular game...or am I misunderstanding you ? I'm actually gay (well.. mostly), so my issue is that they're neither done well, nor do I see them as constructive. Mask of the Betrayer has 5 full companions, among them one romanceable straight male and one romanceable straight female. Did anyone complain about "lack of inclusivity" or "very few romanceable NPCs" when reviewing MotB? No, because there were no such expectations in the first place. I know that there were people (including myself) that complained about it, because we hoped more options and ability define our characters better. ... It was people that complained lack of such options in their previous games that convinced Bioware add two character's that were romance-able by both female and male player characters. Which was prove to be success in degree that Bioware didn't excepted, which you can see from romance options in Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 and how they changed things to Mass Effect 3. And see what that got us. This is (a part) of why I'm against any romance option to begin with- people will complain, and want more, and demand diversity for the sake of diversity (a sickening thought, to me; it's a checkbox mentality that drives a frenzied mob of.. the kind of people I'd rather not see infest more media than they already have), and then people who did not like the core RPG mechanics, or the story, will flock to that game as a dating sim, and will push the development to make it more of a dating sim. My fears may be influenced by a /pol/ way of thinking to an extent, but it is recent history. Perhaps Obsidian would prove to be more resilient, but I, for one, would rather not see that risk taken, especially seeing as a romance option would bring so little when compared to the potential risk to future development (and I've not even mentioned what certain review sites would do- and how it'd influence the abominable metacritic- if the romance options did not fully fill out their checklist). I repeat that this is a can of worms- if not a Pandora's box- that should remain closed, sealed, and forgotten.
  3. I reply with but a single point: imagine the outcry of a certain loud-mouthed group if there was romance in the game, but not romance that completed their checklist. I, for one, would rather avoid that, for a number of reasons.
  4. I am very glad that romance is not an option. It's not that I don't want people to have more options, but I am, quite frankly, cynical about romance in RPGs. I reckon that Bioware did that to me; after DA:O and ME1, they put more and more emphasis on "romance" and got a strange fixation with "inclusivity"- more developer time was spent making, what I consider to be, exceptionally bad writing to develop what amounted to little more than ****-buddies- the characters seemed to be primarily there for you to lust over, and were not interesting in the slightest (though, I must admit, I did lust after Fenris in DA2. But he was an incredibly bad character, and seemed to belong in a slashfic written by a 13 year old. It's just that I've a thing for.. well, I digress). And I mention "inclusivity" because of the options; the characters were not there to be interesting or to add to the story, but were a checklist; "we need an X person, a Y person, a Z person, and a Q person". This checklist mentality essentially made the characters about their sexuality (or "gender identity", which my actual (as opposed to attention-seeking) trans friend will tell you, does not define their personality beyond adding to a pile of "things I gotta deal with". She's got an actual personality beyond "I was porn with a **** but I'm not a dude"). And then there were the adds for the latest DA game, and dear god.. It seemed that the game turned into a dating sim for the tumblr crowd. I shall speak no more on Bioware's latest actions. But why did I speak of this at all? It's because it's what I fear will happen when you include "romance" beyond the tacky, useless, silly thing that Skyrim did. I strongly believe that including romance will either alienate a certain group of people, who will scream their hearts out over what sorts of romance options there are (hello checklist), or will start to influence further game development to turn further titles into dating sims, with more and more emphasis on romance, and less emphasis on things which I consider interesting. But my cynicism goes further; I have absolutely no faith in any developer to write a romance sub-plot which I'd care for. I expect it to be either completely uninteresting, or, worse, detrimental to the overall game. But, cynicism/paranoia/pessimism aside, there's also the concern about character writing; there's a limited development budget, and a limited amount of effort than can be spent on character development. And the more time spent on an NPCs sex life, the less time is spent on actually making that character interesting. To simplify it grossly, if there are 100 lines of dialogue with a character, I'd rather have none of them about the character's sex life (and there are other topics I'd most likely be uninterested in, but this thread deals with romance and not an NPC's mum's hair accessories) and all of them about the character's personality, behavior and believes, so that there's more interesting dialogue in total. And a last point, and this is even more of a personal taste than the rest of the thread; actually being romantically interested in an NPC seems rather disturbing to me. I understand finding the graphics/voice sexually arousing, or otherwise stimulating, but for the player to have actual feelings for lines of code seems bizarre even to me. But that is probably an arbitrary line, as I find it completely normal to, as an example, get angry when an NPC gets mistreated (in my Mount & Blade game, I have made it my mission to hunt down and capture a lord that intended to take one of my peasants into sexual slavery. I swore colourfully at the computer when he did that). To sum up, I am glad that there's no romance option, because I firmly believe that nothing good could come from such a feature. I'd rather the devs include a number of prostitutes for people to enjoy, if such is their desire.
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