What set Dragon Age II apart from its competition was abundance. If you wanted to pursue a queer relationship, you had exactly the same number of potential companions as someone looking to pursue a straight relationship. And these relationships would be as deeply drawn and as beautifully animated as the straight ones.
I found this game mechanic, now dubbed “playersexuality,” liberating. In other video games, my favourite characters were often locked away from me by my choice of gender. If I wanted to, say, pursue Tali’Zorah in Mass Effect, I had to start the game over as a male protagonist. No such calculations were necessary in Dragon Age II. And it wasn’t just the freedom I appreciated: as a recently out bisexual, I was also smitten with a game that let me play the hero alongside a group of queer, pan and bisexual characters.
Since Dragon Age II, more and more games use a playersexual approach to romance, from indie games like Stardew Valley (2016) and Boyfriend Dungeon (2021), to big-budget role-playing games like Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023). The fourth installment in the Dragon Age series, The Veilguard (2024), has also re-embraced playersexuality, with all seven of the companions available for a player character to pursue.
But while playersexuality attracted me to the Dragon Age franchise, it has also been a lightning rod for very disparate groups of gamers. Conservative players, for example, argued that the LGBTQ2S+ relationships in Baldur’s Gate 3 were shoehorned in to “satisfy diversity quotas.” Players of Dragon Age II complained that the companion Anders would always flirt with Hawke (male or female), which made it impossible to avoid queer content; they derided the all-bisexual cast as unrealistic, and as abandoning Bioware’s “main demographic” (straight male gamers).
Players of Dragon Age II complained that the companion Anders would always flirt with Hawke (male or female), which made it impossible to avoid queer content
oh no, won’t someone please think of the bigots? their feelings are getting hurt!
I think there’s a time and place for both. In the beginning being able to have ANY queer sexuality in games was amazing, and having playersexual games levelled the playing field for everyone. On the other hand when done well having characters with their own defined sexualities can work even better in the right context. Cyberpunk did this fairly well. It was nice finding some exclusively gay characters, some hetero. The bi representation could have been better but the fun was finding oh wow this person is their own character with boundaries and personality and preferences! As weird as it sounds it was nice getting rejected by Panam and made her feel more real. I was like ok, cool! She’s not into it but not super weirded out. And getting to know Judy was wonderful! She is an explicitly gay woman and her character was written as such and it felt like it. Her queerness was REAL. It would have been a bummer if there were only straight romances to pursue but that wasn’t the case. It obviously takes more time to develop a specifically tailored romance line for every possible sexuality though so it’s understandable when a developer wants to include everyone and just makes the npcs into you no matter what. And sometimes the game just doesn’t have very deep characters anyway so why not? As far as the straight male audience being upset they have to deal with unwanted advances by men… heh. Damn that must suck huh. looks directly into the camera
Something that’s interesting to me from a writing standpoint would be the difference between how playersexual characters are written from bisexual or pansexual ones. I’ve never seen a playersexual game have the characters actually acknowledge their openness to partners of different genders, they almost always just ignore the topic entirely. I’d be interested in seeing “playersexual” games actually put in the work to establish that in their world, everyone is open to romancing/banging everyone because that’s just how their world is; sort of a pan-normativity. Or other cool explanations! Most of the time it feels more like everyone is straight except towards you, which somehow still feels like a straight male power fantasy.
Many of the arguments against playersexuality, moreover, are tinged with biphobia. […] There is, in some of these complaints, a sense that a bisexual character just isn’t queer enough to count.
This opens and closes the case for me. I fully support the creation and advancement of digital narratives that take other approaches to PC-NPC sexuality, but to characterize something as benign as playersexuality as “erasure” is an overstatement of the problem and feels disregarding of actual examples of malignant erasure.
I was telling my sister that as much as Cyberpunk 2077 thought of every sexuality and gender… They did not have a single bi/pan character in the game. I am not counting the sex robots as characters.
You also can’t romance Claire, afaik, so there’s no trans romance options.
Perhaps the reason for this is as simple as it being a deliberate choice by the developers for replayability reasons. It’s probably pretty common to choose a different gender for the second playthrough - and by limiting characters to being interested in one gender only, this results in the maximum amount of novelty the second time a player experiences the game.
Or maybe I’m overthinking this and it’s just an oversight.
