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).
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