Personally, I'd be happy with a simple "still planning on putting this in sometime this year/it's been delayed along with the rest of the new story content, we're now looking at putting it in around _____". Guild Summit helped, but that was what, coming up on six months ago? It's about time for another proper update.

These. In that order. Also making it free to transfer all the mods in one piece of equipment to another at once. I dislike choosing between being effective and looking how I want. eta: And more character slots! This isn't really one thing anymore, is it?

So I've not been by, or played, for a few months now; can we be gay yet?

Yeah, I think it's kinda amusing how many people have no problem with the idea that an NPC is interested in any character, any look, and personality type you can possibly create, so long as they're the right gender, but as soon as you change the latter, cries of "but it's not realistic!" pop up.

You have been misinformed.

As some people have alluded to, I'd be very hesitant to try and apply our own society's attitudes towards same-sex relationships to how it'd be viewed in the game. I see no reason why, outside of cases where the companion themself or you are expected to produce an heir, that they should even see it as something surprising, to find that they are attracted to you. And that's good, because I've had my fill of "is this too gay for you?" moments in other Bioware games where I didn't think they particularly fit.

Pretty much everything on Voss from the Imperial side. Quite fun to basically be given a planet and told "ok, we need the natives to like us, so be nice to them and be sneaky when you're going out murdering Republic guys and sabotaging their operations!"

I fully support this solution.

Hey there, Yeah, there are a couple places it comes up; the actual first KotOR game is one, where your female character can have a relationship with a female Jedi if you like, and there's also a book with two Mandalorian guys who are together, though I'm not sure of the name of it; like gekko said, it'll be somewhere in the last 80-odd pages, if you're really interested However, even if that wasn't the case, can you really not think of anywhere the game has introduced something that you don't see anywhere in canon? Or in general, that the franchise hasn't been including more elements that nobody would have thought to put in back when it originally started? As an analogy, I could say "why is my female Sith able to end up in a coercive, abusive relationship with one of her male crewmembers when we don't see anything like that in SW?" Well... the reason you don't see it is because the writers took what they knew of the Sith and of human nature, and built on that to add something that'd make sense as a possibility for how we would want to play our characters. Likewise, they know that relationships exist in SW, that these people are pretty similar to us in a lot of ways, that love in SW doesn't recognize barriers of species... to go from that to thinking that there could be people for whom it wouldn't recognize barriers of gender either isn't a great leap. In the end, putting this in is simply about giving us choices in how we play our characters, letting us make them really ours. "Letting us live out our Star Wars fantasy" is how I think the developers have put it previously. And that means putting in a full range of options, for all of us, as far as is possible.

Sorry, I'm a little confused; how might it do so?

This isn't just a Star Wars game, this is a Star Wars roleplaying game. And most people (and, apparently, humanoid Star Wars aliens) have a sex drive. I am happy they're putting it in. I'm not happy they didn't put it in at launch, and yes, I imagine I won't be completely happy when it comes either, simply because there'll be some people I wanted to be available who won't be. My happiness with their treatment of this content isn't binary.

mrcaptainpants: I take your point, re forgetting everything that happened so quickly. I was just so excited and relieved to hear that it was still going to be in, that we even had a timeframe, that it's taken me awhile to realise that no, it's still not what it should be. Better than complete silence != sufficient to address our concerns about how this has been handled thus far. Yeah. Ditto to all of this. I said at the time that DA2 came out that that was literally the first time I have ever felt valued by a company as a specifically lesbian customer, or treated on the same footing as the straight customers. And that bought a lot of love and loyalty from me; it's a pity they seem intent on destroying all of that with how they're handling things now. I only hope they do better on future games; not having it in at launch was the wrong thing to do, regardless of the reason, but it's not like they can go back in time and fix it now.

Yeah. The only way I can really see them doing it at this point, given that anyone you run into in the course of a quest already available will be inaccessible now to a bunch of people, is to make the new companions available via completing various quests that'll show up as you go through a planet the first time, which we can double back for. Which is not what I would call well-integrated if they're completely new people. I mean, if instead, for example (Sith Inquisitor chapter 1 spoilers):

No offense taken! I'm just trying to figure out if there's any way this makes sense to me, something I can see as a reasonable explanation for why they can't just open up all current romances to everyone

But that's the thing; what does this mean? How does changing pronouns make it wrong?

How I read the statement was actually that there are differences between how someone relates to a male and how they relate to a female; however, that hardly improves matters. I am concerned about this as well, about why they feel that simply switching the pronouns and doing a little editing for consistency would be bad storytelling.

Pretty sure I've spent more than that on things I've enjoyed less; this has the potential to basically be 8 single-player games in one, with frequent new content I'll only sometimes need to pay more for, and a fair amount of replayability. Worth $15/month to me, and it's not like they're gonna delete my characters if I get bored at some point and unsub for a couple months. Also, it's my money; maybe a reason that's a little less subjective would be good?

I don't really mind how it currently is too much for something like the early flashpoints, where I *can* just go back later on when I'm a high enough level if I'm only interested in them for the story, but being locked out of something like the Battle of Ilum, when it's basically the cap on my entire single-player story thus far, leaves me less than happy. Way I see it, if you make it so that solo players can still access group content in some fashion for the parts they're interested in, it's not spending resources on one group to the detriment of another; it's freeing the developers up in future to make more content which will appeal to multiple groups that don't necessarily have a lot of crossover at present, which means more content they can make in total.

What's wrong with that? The game was advertised as being for all play styles, and as a solo player who's missing out on a fair bit of story, I'd really like it if there was a way to go through these things with companions instead, even if it's for scaled down rewards or the like.

Is there any intention of ever giving us the ability to have more than one companion out, even if it's only in certain instanced areas? As someone who's almost exclusively a solo player, I think this would open up a lot of story-related content, like flashpoints, that I simply have no way of seeing at present, as well as giving me incentive to upgrade the gear on more than the one companion I use exclusively.

Yeah. My most difficult fight in the game was against two healers. Did nothing except heal the one of them I was hitting, keeping him pretty reliably at 70-80% health. Occasionally if my interrupts on one of them + my companion's freezing went very well, I could get him down to 30%!

Simple solution for rewarding those people who put the effort in on their characters and want to, say, try out that unlocked race but don't have room, while keeping people from making a ton of low-level alts and... cluttering up the server? Or whatever reason you currently have for the character limit. Put some maximum limit on if absolutely necessary, but a Legacy made up of 8 people is a little small.

So what I'd take away from this is that it's possible, it's rare, and if you're, say, a rather high ranking Sith yourself, there's a better chance you could get away with it.

Yeah. Like I said, captain, I sympathize with how you're feeling... and I hope we get that explanation, too, not least because this really is too enjoyable a game to have spoiled by something which shouldn't have even been an issue in the first place. I touched on this briefly last night, but I think it was lost in all the excitement; I think that, going forward, we need to be putting together a list of our immediate questions which still have implications for our ability to play our characters. Things like "should I be avoiding conversations with someone I'd want to romance if they became available, or will we get a second chance on current companions?" I think this is worth doing, both for the obvious reason that this is information we still need, if possible, and because I think the response, or lack thereof, will be informative in terms of whether this was all simply a mistake on Bioware's parts, or if they only responded at all due to the pressure we were applying, and they intend to go back to remaining silent. Let me be clear - I'm very happy with the information we have, and I certainly don't expect to have a developer at our beck and call to answer whatever questions we come up with. But if we, as a group, could restrict our questions to what information we feel it is crucial that we know, explain why, and give them a reasonable amount of time to answer, or at least explain why they can't do so, before we start pushing for a response (end of April, perhaps, since hopefully 1.2 will be in and relatively ironed out by then)? I think that would have the potential to help, both with our plans and with leftover negative feelings from all this. One of my questions which, unfortunately, I don't think they can answer is "which currently romanceable companions will become available?" Speculations aside, however, it is still one I think is fairly crucial, so I say we include it anyway; also, a response to the first question of "yes, you'll get a second chance with the SGRA NPCs" would make this one less important. The third one I'd put in is whether they'll have flirts upon meeting them, or romance-related interjections during our class story up to 50, like current OGRA companions do; at present, the possibility that this will be the case is stopping me from playing my characters.

I sympathize; however, the developer who spoke seemed like he might possibly be misinformed about how much communication we actually had received; he said something about how they'd been saying "soon", and seemed to expect we already knew that this was intended to come with the new story updates. I'm not saying that such a breakdown in communication within their own company as well somehow excuses them, but it at least would make me feel a little better about what their intentions towards us have been. We are pretty soon after launch and they're working on quite a lot; I can forgive them being a little incompetent at this point, so long as there's no malice in there. Like others have said, this is obviously a personal decision based upon whether you can still enjoy the game or not, but I thought I might offer a slightly different perspective, in case it helped.