This discourse was going around twitter today apparently and im curious takes from here.
Which is it for you?
For me i prefer playersexuality. I want to be able to romance any romance option regardless of my charachters gender. I dont want to be stuck with only Arcade Gannon if i want to do m/m
I agree that sexuality can be important to a charachter. But if you wanna do that, seems like the charachter can just not be a romance option.
That said. In RPGs devs can do what they want. You want a charachter to be monosexual and a romance option, have at it. (Unless theyre all straight, then fuck you).
I do kinda hate what The Sims did by adding monosexuality. Felt like such a virtue signal that made the game less fun. All Sims being pansexual was always more fun for me. Especially since i usually play that game as a pansexual slut. Unless i decide my player Sim is mono, but thats on the player's end.
Monosexual townies in the Sims should at least be optional (is it? Idk havent played Sims 4 since this update).
Ideally yeah. But it does take a fair amount of dev resources to add in depth romance sidequests. Like if its a Skyrim situation where they dont bother with that and you just do one minor thing for them and theyre ready to marry you, then fine. But if its a situation like Bioware games then you gotta make sure to have enough options of every combo that situations like what i describe comes up. Every charachter being "mechanically pansexual" was probably actually easier for the BG3 devs than that would have been.
Funny enough, as much as I complained about The Sims example. Its probably actually the best fit for what you describe. Ifs a life sim, so dealing with the reality that your Sims's first crush doesnt have a compatible sexuality makes sense for that. And since theres not prewritten romance sidequests, and its entirely player generated, then theres not the extra resources. Just the code they added to make the system work for every Sim.
But, then again, The Sims is a sandbox game, so it should still be optional if you want to deal with that. As someone who likes to play out my pansexual slut fantasies in that game i would turn it off lol.
Yeah I wasn’t accounting developer resources when writing out my posts. With the amount of workplace abuse and overworking and crunch, playersexual NPCs are just the best choice for labor, and trying to add unique sexualities to each character while under extreme pressure will likely result in terrible story and characterization.
I agree that games like Sims should have optional settings for just about everything since you control (or choose to be passive) the story from start to finish.