Thanks, I appreciate it. It's easy to forget sometimes.

Please, guys, spoiler tags exist for a reason. I've only reached Tatooine on my SW and I already know a good chunk of what's next in the story from this thread alone.

I would love it if they'd put focus back on story, but right now it seems like either the people interested in story are a minority or Bioware just aren't paying attention to them. Personally I'm not too interested in Cytharat, although I suppose on the whole it would be more interesting story-wise to make him a companion rather than a new one-size-fits-all cartel market companion.

In games like KotOR you can reload an old save if you screw up, it's not a permanent thing. In this game you'd have to replay through 55 levels just to get back to Makeb and redo that mission. Given that they already took out the ability to kill your existing companions because people immediately regretted it, it seems unlikely that they'd turn Cytharat into a companion.

Jedi that have issues with the Order were interesting when they were the exception, but now it seems they make up the majority. It may just be the amount of people who RP them skewing my perception though. You could probably get some really interesting philosophical debates going with a character you're trying to persuade back to the Order, but on the other hand I'd rather have a character that wasn't in a lower position than the PC. I think all the force using companions so far have been padawans or apprentices, so it would be interesting to change it up a little. As for force users outside the Sith and the Jedi it would probably easiest to create a character from one of the species where everyone is force sensitive, such as the Korunnai or the Anzati, although I have no idea how the timelines would work out. That would avoid having the code of either order clash with whatever class you pair them with and also get around explaining how they know how to use their abilities.

The best things about humans and near-humans as romance interests is that, especially with customizations, there are very few people that will not find them attractive. The farther away you get from human the more likely it is that people will find them too ugly or weird to romance, and if we only get one option for SGR it makes sense to play it safe. Now if we were getting TWO options per class.... of course it's all just wishful thinking right now anyway.

Honestly I'm not willing to go through a ton of extra effort for content that was supposed to already be in the game. If there was a miscommunication at some point and the devs believe that putting in a few flirts instead of companion romances fulfills their obligations so that's all we're going to get, then so be it. Even if it turned out to be possible I don't like the idea of basically doing their work for them, and I don't like the precedent it sets. It's one thing to show companies that players are interested and willing to play games with gay and bi characters, but it's something completely different to show them that they can get away with not including them and then have money thrown at them on top of the base price of the game in order to get those characters.

Well, he's got a black guy and a guatemalan guy which is slightly better than what I expected. I hear he's planning on casting at least on more woman as Obi-Wan's daughter, which is horrible in terms of story but probably better than having only one woman per generation.

Given that they weren't included at launch I doubt anyone will put in extra effort for it now, but it does make me wonder how companion romances would differ between same and opposite genders. I suspect if we get companion romance now it would just be opening the existing romance to both genders, but I really can't see Corso treating a relationship with a male smuggler the same way he does a female one. Kaliyo and Vector probably wouldn't be all that different, and I'm not familiar enough with the other companions to guess about them.

You're right, I just assumed given that that was what we were talking about.

I find that surprising given that in Skyrim the romance amounts to "Will you marry me?" "Yes" and then maybe three lines of dialogue while your spouse cooks you food. I can understand not liking Bioware romances, but to say Skyrim is better at them? Skyrim basically does exactly what a lot of people accuse Bioware of doing which is making flat characters who are interested in you no matter what.

If all we wanted was to see two men or two women kissing there are much easier ways to do that. Especially considering how disturbing the actual in-game kisses usually end up looking.

I like the backpedalling you're doing here. Face it, it's been proven that romance can indeed be an important part of the SW universe. Nobody's saying the game needs it to make sense, or that it needs to be the main focus of the game, just that it would be nice to have especially since hetero romance is already in. If the game was created solely based on what was in the trilogies it would be a much smaller and more boring game.

You know, while we're at it companions aren't all that important. We could just as easily have their functions served by a silent droid companion, it would save a lot of effort on the part of the writers and programmers. We don't need to see our characters interactions with other people in the game to imagine that the have them.

Like Tatile said earlier, without his relationship with Padme Anakin wouldn't have fallen to the dark side. His story would have been completely different without the romantic aspect. It's entirely possible to play KoToR without romancing anyone but someone decided romance was important enough to make canon Revan marry Bastila. And just look at all the squabbling in the early EU over who was going to marry Luke. Romance is a large part of most storytelling, even if the story isn't specifically a "romance story". Nobody's asking for the game to be entirely about romance, I'm not sure where you got that from. We just want something similar to what's already in the game, except for same sex couples.

In the official movie canon romance is a reasonably large part. If you want to count the EU as well I think you'd be hard pressed to find a book or game that doesn't include romance of some kind, and they're far outnumbered by those that do. It's obviously important enough to include in the form of straight romances in this game.

Maybe not the focal point, but can you seriously deny that Han and Leia or Anakin and Padme were an important part of the movies?

I agree with the reasoning behind not including a toggle, but I think it would have been a much stronger statement if they'd actually managed to put full SGR characters in the game by now. As it is it kind of comes off as a lazy attempt to look progressive while not actually having to do anything. I appreciate the flirts that have been put in so far and I'm still optimistic that eventually we'll get companion SGR but honestly I'd rather have full SGR storylines and a toggle than what we have now and the statement about toggles being discrimination.

I guess that makes sense, but I think the distinction is needed. Otherwise heteronormative becomes very narrow and almost useless as a category. I'm still not sure there's a huge difference between sexuality in this game and in the movies, but there's only a couple relationships for comparison in the originals anyway.

Huh, I would have thought that there was another word for that and heteronormative would just refer to the expectation that everyone is straight and that's normal. Maybe I'm misunderstanding but it seems kind of odd to equate not filling traditional gender roles with being something other than heterosexual.

I thought heteronormative refers to things being heterosexual, not how they are within that heterosexuality. Does that mean that straight relationships outside the stereotype of "man brings home the bacon, woman cleans the house" aren't heteronormative?

How are the relationships in TOR any more heterosexual than the ones in the original trilogy?

That would really only work after you've played the game once. Who's going to choose what companion to romance before they even meet them?

The problem with the EU is they're running out of space for writing huge dramatic story lines with consequences that affect the galaxy. There are so many places to write interesting smaller scale stories like the X-wing series, but anything larger is going to be overwritten 50 years or so down the timeline so we can do the whole thing over with a different set of heroes and villains. Even if KotOR 3 was set after TOR whatever it does will eventually be overturned by Darth Bane later on. Since if it's made it won't be directly following the plot of the first two I think it would be neat if it did something completely separate from Jedi vs Sith. Technically I suppose that could be fitted in the 300 years between games, and if it had a goal unrelated to giving either the Jedi or the Sith domination over the galaxy it wouldn't necessarily be overwritten by TOR.

Hmm, yeah, I somehow forgot that they could set it after this game. D'oh. That would probably work better, but I do hope that whenever it was set the Exile and Revan could at least remain ambiguous.