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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29373 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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With regards to DEI, my feeling from story-heavy games such as Bioware is that gay dating, like straight dating, is mostly opt-in.

It's only opt-in in the same way the game itself is; you can always turn a game off and stop playing, but to get access to large portions of what you paid for you have to directly engage with the wokeness (in this case, gay dating).

In BG3 most of the good character moments are locked behind romance. You will not learn nearly so much about your companions or their backstories, have the same influence over them, or in the end get the same encounters and questlines, if you don't explicitly choose to seduce them. There is no friendship option, you can't become good enough friends with someone that they trust you with their life; apparently the only possible strong relationship two people can have is sexual.

IIRC this is also the case with Hades and virtually every other similar game. "Opt-in" is not really an accurate way to describe a core gameplay mechanic gatekeeping large storylines.

IIRC this is also the case with Hades and virtually every other similar game.

I don't think so. With hades you have 3 romances (and you can max them at the same time).

Now the friendship there was also bribing every character with ambrosia, but nothing was gatekept. It was - I have ambrosia, friendship +1

To elaborate, once you max out the relationship gauge there's an explicit choice to fuck or not to fuck.

I have yet to play BG3, so I did not know this.

Typically, in earlier Bioware games, romance was mostly an additional, optional branch near the end of the character arks, so you did not have to replay the games five times because one party member was only into male non-evil dwarven clerics or whatever.

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