Baldur’s Gate 3 is the latest big game to follow an inclusive (but divisive) trend in video game courtship
I’m personally not too keen on the playersexual approach, though this article does provide some interesting viewpoints from creators of a couple of games written that way. Still, this admission from one of those creators
“What ends up happening is it feels not only like everyone is a little bit pansexual, but also nobody even sees gender, which is not real. That’s not an authentic way to build the world.
…and this from David Gaider
“We didn’t like how [playersexual] made the characters feel like they existed in service of the player; like they were there in the game to be a toy. […] We felt like that wasn’t why those characters existed. That wasn’t the kind of game we were making. These characters were characters first, and they had their own stories, and the player could interact with them, but it wasn’t always about the player.”
pretty much summarize my feelings on the matter. And yes, I did feel this way about BG3 too.
I genuinely prefer when the companion characters aren’t playersexual, since it makes them feel for real to me. It also gives me a reason to switch up things like gender or sexuality for my character on replays. The only reason I’ve ever played as BroShep in Mass Effect was to romance characters I couldn’t as FemShep.
I was watching a video on YouTube yesterday of someone’s favorite romances in video games, and all I could think watching it was, “You’ve never once played as a female character, huh,” because all his favorite romances were for straight male characters, and that just felt so, I dunno, limited and boring to me. Romance Garrus, romance Dorian, try to role play and not just play as yourself.
Great quotes and I totally agree. I think it’s a good example of how things that can seem really inclusive on paper sometimes go so far they swing around and feel exploitive in a different way.
I could imagine one way they could try and still have the playersexual thing, but maybe make it feel better, is if the potential partners are as picky as real life people. So in other words, it’s possible to court anyone, but you have to really nail it to get any of them at all. No idea if it would fix the issue, but it sounds interesting to me to see how that would feel.
This is a really fantastic article with a lot of great quotes and examples. It seems like a really nuanced topic, and I found myself agreeing with many things said on all sides of the discussion.
As someone who likes immersion and grounded fantasy, I do find myself more taken with the dragon age inquisition approach, but I also think it’s great to have some games out there that do take the playersexual approach. As long as people can understand it’s ultimately wish fulfilment, then I think having it out there can be very fun and even empowering for people.
I prefer playersexual. I think some being bi and some being unspecified is great. But maybe that’s just me being sick and tired of the lesbian love interest sucking
And I’ll point to Dragon Age Inquisition as my example. The writer for Sera clearly didn’t like lesbians and especially not her and Josephine had by far the least content of any romance option
My suggestion would be to just…. DON’T. It’s incredibly unnecessary at best/ and embarrassingly cringy at worst.
