In Mass Effect 1 and 2 you could explore different romance options but the one romance option that could not be explored was a gay romance option for male Shepard. Looks like Bioware is switching things up for Mass Effect 3. Series executive producer Casey Hudson has tweeted the following:
“Happy to confirm #ME3 supports wider options for love interests incl. same-sex for m&f chars, reactive to how you interact w/them in-game.”
Mass Effect 3 will be having a new option for Shepard but Casey Hudson has also stated that there will be no more new romantic options. Instead players will be dealing with the love interests from the first two games. In a interview with PC Gamer Hudson explained not having new romance options for Mass Effect 3:
It had a few more. In this one, we don’t really have new characters that are part of the romance stuff in the way that we did in Mass Effect 2, where we introduced a lot of characters. So this is more about how you, if you’re a new player, how you start these romances with the existing characters. If you’ve had relationships with previous characters, then it’s your opportunity to resolve those. And again, it’s in the context of a ‘World War II’-type setting, so you don’t really know if you’re going to survive, or what kind of a world is going to live beyond the story. So it’s kind of that situation.
But we also have some interesting things happening, where you’ve got Ashley and Kaiden from the first game, you’ve got Liara, and there’s sort of a love triangle there. And then we gave people a bunch of new characters. People said “Well, I just want my Mass Effect 1 characters, and I’m not interested in any of these characters.” But then a lot of people had romances with those characters, and now the fun is bringing back some of those characters from Mass Effect 1 and putting them back in the mix, and looking at what you did in Mass Effect 2 and bringing some… interesting scenarios around those things.
It will be interesting to see not only how gamers react to this but also how it factors into the story. It makes me wonder how previous romantic choices will effect what we decide to do here. If your Shepard character decides to pursue a same sex relationship in this game, after pursuing a non same-sex relationship in the firs two games, how will the other characters react to that? Will Shepard hide the relationship from his other partners or will he be open about it?
What do you think?