BioWare on lack of homosexuality in ME2: "We view it as a PG-13 action movie"

News by Nathan Grayson Contributor

Published on April 6, 2010

Mass Effect 2's a game of choice. But even though your choices determine the fate of the entire galaxy, Shepard's sexuality is firmly set in stone.

So, what gives?

"Everything new that we add still requires extra content. Some people might argue in a case like that you could just have the same kinds of scenes that just work with different characters. But we wouldn’t really want to have it that way. You’d want to take a proper approach to designing those scenes, otherwise you’d see the same scene. So we kind of pulled back and looked at where we had to draw the line in terms of how much content we make. How much should we support?" BioWare's Casey Hudson told 1UP.

"So we kind of pulled back and said, 'Well, the love interest is part of the story and it helps you care about the characters in a different way.' We still view it as... if you’re picturing a PG-13 action movie. That’s how we’re trying to design it. So that’s why the love interest is relatively light."

"Sometimes, in some of our games, we are going to have a defined character with a more defined view. Almost like a third-person narrative -- where Mass Effect is more in that vein, Dragon Age isn’t in that vein; you could see the differences between the two. It’s just part of the design and the choices made for each game," BioWare's Ray Muzyka added.

"It doesn’t mean that we’ve in anyway changed our philosophy toward enabling choice. We love giving players choice, and we are going to continue to enable that for future games. That’s a commitment for some of our franchises. For some other franchises we’ve had more defined characters and sort of approaches to things, and they’ve had a more defined personality and a more defined approach to the way they’ve proceed through the game and the world."

So yeah. Them's the breaks. Looks like your female Shepard's forbidden love affair with Tali's only gonna happen in your dreams for now. Or your fan fictions. Can you say Tali-Shepard-EDI three-way?