We need to put gay character options in the game. You can see the well-meaning thought processes involved in trying to fix this narrow issue.
And the compromise is Makeb, the gay planet, available only via download – and the only place in the galaxy where relationships can be formed with NPCs of the same gender. Immediately, the team announced that it would be updating its romantic content, but early in January, the game's executive producer, Jeff Hickman warned that this was going to be a complex process, and hinted that compromises would be necessary. The developers created ten male characters and ten female characters, a nicely symmetrical field of potential romantic interest.īut for some reason, the nature of those relationships was limited to heterosexual interaction only – an odd decision from a studio that has featured same-sex relationships in its Mass Effect and Dragon Age titles. For Bioware, this journey began when the company made love an option in its massively multiplayer game, Star Wars: The Old Republic. Makeb, the gay planet, is the sort of problem that comes about when a series of perfectly reasonable decisions takes a development team to a very weird place.
