I can see how it'd fit, I just think putting those options in would be a minefield of trouble.

I get a queasy feeling having it applied to either SGR or OGR... not because of the inclusion of an insult but for the lack of variation. I'd prefer to see an aggressive/relaxed option system so the player could accept aggressively or relaxed, be neutral or reject in an aggressive or relaxed manner. It could even include ongoing neutral/indecisive options so the companion could eventually explode at the PC in frustration over their wishy-washiness. It'd be fun. I do agree with such a system being applied to everyone, if only because it allows the more aggressive characters to be played aggressively. Just don't make the aggressive rejections homophobic (or heterophobic). Of all the options it seems the most suitable compromise.

It was suggested in prior incarnations of this thread that the left side of the wheel could be used for flirts and the right side for non-flirt responses. That would make it easy for people to avoid flirting with people they don't want to (they stay on the right side of the dialogue wheel) and also opens more spaces for conversational options. <shrugs> As ideas go I think it's a good one.

There absolutely does need to be some kind of balancing of the dialogue options. There are way too many in which you can only be flirty or mean. Some neutral, charmingly clueless or even downright emotionless responses would be good.

Ah, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. I miss that book. Never saw Cats, unfortunately.

Which is a little sad, really. Oh well. Well, given that both EDI (in Mass Effect) and Holiday (in SWTOR) are self-aware AIs with emotive capacity I can't really see why they wouldn't, at some point, present a romanceable AI companion. Or at least a flirtable AI NPC. See, I don't see a problem with this. Remove male/female flags for clothing, perhaps add in a pitch shifter to adjust the pitch of the existing voices up or down, maybe (if you REALLY want to cover all bases) change from four body types to a height-weight-muscle slider system and you've got a HECK of a lot more flexibility in character creation. It certainly isn't the same as a character selection system in which you can choose your gender identity from a huge list but it'd give people more flexibility than the binary options. Having said that I play an intersex Sith Inquisitor and I just selected Female for her because that's what she looks the most like.

I won't comment on the whole conversational gist because I just got up but I believe the two answers to this are "Yes," and "Mostly for simplicity's sake." Be aware that gender identity issues are still so very unfixed that people who've studied them in universities around the world can't sort them out. There's an awful lot of content to get into with any study of gender identity, gender roles, sexuality and the like, and all of it lays well outside the scope of ordinary game designers. Including same-sex relationships in a game where the framework for relationships already exists (and is utilised by heterosexual relationships) is relatively easy. If you start throwing in other points along the gender spectrum (including but not limited to transgendered, intersex and genderless identities) then you vastly increase the amount of work needed (mostly for the writers, I believe, but also for the voice actors and the lawyers). Anything that changes models (I mean REAL changes, not just reskins) is going to cause a leap in work again. If you want a companion to have a unique head then you need to get concept artists in, they need to collaborate with modellers, they need to collaborate with writers and so on; with SWTOR there's also a requirement for alternate appearances. I got this thought recently when I was looking through a book called The Art of Alice: Madness Returns. I was actually looking for Julie Dillon art (of which there wasn't much) but I was startled at how much content they designed (and even modelled and put in the game) but didn't make functional because they ran out of time. Arguments over things like Alice's basic look and even her blue dress went on for ages. They changed the weapon system (and all of the outfits) about halfway through, which would have taken a complete redesign. My point is that there's an awful lot that we don't see (though personally I'd quite like to) and what seems simple and obvious to us might be an absolute PITA to actually implement - due to interpersonal clashes amongst the creativity staff alone, not to mention everything else. In each case of every companion we see you can bet there have been arguments over what they should look like, how they should talk, what their values should be - and that's all before getting to sexuality and gender identity. How many people wanted Kira tougher or Tharan more flamboyant? How many staff hated Holiday's Digital Valley Girl act? We have no idea. And you can imagine how much more confusing and aggressive it would be to throw in more gender identities. Maybe 'time and budgeting constraints' actually means 'we kept arguing for way too long'. There'd be arguments about how to write such characters, warnings and disputes over what is and isn't stereotypical, considerations over what kinds of species could suit for companions that don't fit into the binary gender model (and whether humans fit into such a model in any case). That's not to say I wouldn't love to see that kind of content. Heck to the yeah, I would. I'd LOVE it. But a lot just doesn't go into games that would otherwise be great additions because people can't agree in time, or because time really DOES run out, or because there's no way to attain a particular look or physics functionality.

Okay, maybe we can settle down. Lots of people have suggested lots of things over the past years this has been an issue. That's greatly appreciated and certainly potentially constructive but it doesn't exactly make you unique, SithKoriandr, and plenty of people who've made suggestions have been of variable support to this matter. None of the posters here have the capacity to stop others from posting - only the mods can do that - so perhaps for the sake of some peace we can all just make an effort to see everyone's point of view. For example yes, it is true that boycotting works in some instances and yes, the numbers would be a curious thing to see. But it would also quash any attempt to keep an LGBT voice on this matter on the forums. So, while interesting, it is perhaps understandable that someone perceiving a suggestion of boycotting as a 'shut up or leave' statement (a very large number of which we've been attacked with; this is not a small issue) and taking it as such. After all it'd be interesting but given BW:A's history of not communicating it probably wouldn't do anything except crush the number of people vocally supporting this matter. If anything I'd say more support and more voices would be better.

I think negative affection for dumping someone makes total sense. They want you, you tell them no, they're butthurt. Seems fine and it drives up the immersion a lot for me. As for Morrigan, the conclusion I came to immediately when I saw that -15 drop was that she clearly digs you but doesn't want to admit it. And it IS Morrigan. She'd rather die than show weakness, especially to a man.

Right. So they weren't even saying that gay people don't exist in Star Wars, but that from their perspective the terms don't exist in Star Wars. As SithKoriandr points out above this is BW:A's Star Wars so if anyone would know it'd be them.

At the risk of sounding like the party pooper can we please get off the topics of real-world morality, domestic violence, dating protocol and gender roles, so we can get back to talking about SRGAs and SGFPs?

...Okay, forget I said a thing.

If only that's how this worked, eh.

You've slipped this line in a couple of your posts and I wanted to address it as I think it's misconceived. Here's the background of what I'm about to state, wrapped in spoiler tags for brevity's sake: He referred to SGRs, not SGRAs, and I feel a certain amount of misunderstanding has arisen due to that truncated acronym. Some of the non-companion flirts result in a bit of fade-to-black action and I think that the use of 'SGRs' was, in this case, intended to refer to that (they're not arcs precisely, after all, but could roughly be described as romances). Here's where I think the issue is: most of us (myself included) largely see no difference between the acronyms 'SGR' and 'SGRA' except, obviously, for the letter 'A'. When I use the term it's to refer to the companion story arcs and whilst I can't speak for anyone else I do suspect that most people consider 'SGRAs' and 'SGRs' to mean the same thing: same gender companion romance arcs. I've started using the acronym SGFPs (same gender flirt prompts) to differentiate between the two. If Mr Gonzales were to address his position on the matter I suspect he'd clarify his use of 'SGRs' in the context of the comments you're referring to, Tatile, was to refer to non-companion flirt prompts. I respectfully suggest that it's inaccurate to claim his comments mean that he thinks that what you call 'throw-away flirts' are equal to full-fledged companion romances. I likewise suggest that when he referred to SGRs he did so as it was the term being used in the Hickman Update and was referring directly back to that (swapping to a different acronym would have just confused the matter) but that both he and the Hickman Update are referring specifically to SGFPs going in with Makeb, and not that they're intended to be a replacement (or even particularly comparative to) SGRAs. The only one who can clarify what he meant for certain, of course, is JovethGonzales himself.

I agree, it does sound wrong, but options are low. If you can think of a better term for someone who's been indoctrinated with the belief that monogamy is the only viable model of relationships and is attempting to break free of that, well, you let me know. A game, yes. SWTOR, I don't think it'll ever happen. It's taken us a year just to get word of upcoming non-companion NPC same sex flirts.

Your agent would get along with plenty of my characters, then. Depending on where you are, I guess. There are a lot of laws regarding de facto partners that are the same for same sex couples in Australia now. I don't know many polyamorous people who are totally cool with sharing either. Sharing with rules and negotiations, and with coping mechanisms for jealousy spikes, sure - but those things don't need to be represented in-game. If polyamory were put in SWTOR (which I don't expect to ever happen) those things would be non-mechanical writing elements, I assume. Then again I don't know a single polyamorous person who's not in some way or another a recovering monogamist living in a monogamy-centric society. Historical evidence suggests that people brought up in societies accepting of non-monogamy don't (surprise surprise) have hang-ups about it.

I'd love to see polyamory in SWTOR but frankly I don't think that's going to happen. Having a companion partner who doesn't mind you playing about with non-companion NPCs is probably about the closest we'll ever see. I mean, look at the furore over two people with the same shaped genitals. I don't think either should be an issue but I can see how BW:A might want to avoid that metaphorical can of worms.

Spoilers, people.

Snipped for length. It was a good post with a number of salient points. Unfortunately at the Guild Summit in March 2012 the only thing they were emphatically clear on regarding SGRAs is that they were consciously choosing to avoid doing exactly what you've suggested. They've chosen to make more in-depth changes to the romance arcs in order to make them SGRA-capable so no matter how easy it could be with a few gender flag alterations and a handful of rephrased lines they're not going to do that. As we've seen BW:A don't do stuff they've chosen not to do (a trait that can be both positive and negative) so for all of their statements regarding how difficult or expensive it's proving to implement SGRAs I think they need to be taken with a grain of salt and an implied addendum of 'the way we've chosen to implement them'.

Seems little point, given that the entire MMO and everything in it deviates from original movie canon. It's not their fight to fight. EA/Bioware has the right to deviate from the movie canon. They literally paid for those rights. Besides, fight to keep which canon/lore intact? Unlike most universes Star Wars keeps track of as much of the different forms of canon lore as it can (in a big database they apparently call 'the Holocron'). There's more than one form of valid canon lore for Star Wars, and people coming into SWTOR claiming it should stick faithfully and unfailingly to the movie lore are actually fighting against the valid EU lore. I mean, I'm cool with people making constructive criticism about changes. That's entirely fine. But taking the party-line that the writers don't actually have the right to do so seems to be missing the point a bit. They could. I don't personally think they need to. There's so much in the way of unused species in Star Wars lore that they could be releasing several a year for over a decade and not need to worry about running out. I'd expect to see Zeltron before Star Wars-ified asari, in any case.

Well, given there's several different forms of accepted Star Wars canon and the MMO itself fits firmly into the Expanded Universe portion of it I'd suggest the hardcore purists should probably not be playing. Or, even better, should relax their concepts of what is and isn't 'canon'.

That you're you. Human sexuality is fluid and gender identity certainly is too. It feels more natural to you now to play only females; that's just how you roll, and that's cool. Maybe that'll change in the future. Maybe it won't. probably no point over-analysing it either way.

True, very true. I thought of that but they're different studios and even if there's no legal issues (I expect there wouldn't be) I wonder to myself if it might cause interdepartmental stresses. I can imagine it might. The people who developed the asari might well be a little annoyed if someone went, 'Hey, we're going to give these gals a facelift and transplant them into Star Wars, yo.'

Personally I think the asari thing has been done. From a writer's perspective just about any mono-gendered female-style species is going to be directly compared to the asari, and writers often already have enough challenges (like deadlines and hyper-critical fans) without adding to the pile.

I think there are a couple of species that could qualify as mono-gendered but they tend to be hermaphroditic (like the Hutts, which... aren't... really that similar to the asari at all). But they've already invented the Voss and Gormak for the MMO so I could imagine they'd be more wary of crossing over Mas Effect's copyright lines than they would be wary of deviating from established Star Wars lore.