BioWare released Mass Effect 2 in January this year. And as in BioWare’s Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect 2 does not allow you to romance characters as the same sex as your game character. Kotaku is reporting that at the GDC this year, Tracy John asked Casey Hudson and Ray Muzyka why Mass Effect 2 didn’t have homosexual relationships, and the responses he got were rather intriguing.
Hudson said that BioWare didn’t want to have simply the same scenes played out with different characters, and that something like that needed additional content. “We still view it as… if you’re picturing a PG-13 action movie,” Hudson said. “That’s how we’re trying to design it. So that’s why the love interest is relatively light.”
Muzyka on the other hand gave a slightly different explanation for why homosexual relationships in the game were not possible. He says that having a homosexual Shepard was just not in the script for Mass Effect 2. “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,” he said.
Two marginally different reasons given why homosexuality was left out of ME2. Both seem to suggest that homosexuality wasn’t planned as a part of the game. According to Muzyka, a homosexual Shepard didn’t quite fit with what BioWare wanted for ME2. So what could this tell us? Is there some revelation from the developer in the next installment that needs Commander Shepard to have been straight in ME2?