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 actually agree somewhat that it does make it slightly less queer because queerness is about going against the non free norms of society or at least making people more free. One part of queerness that I think often gets overlooked in games is agency of characters, therefore making them all only interested in the player or at least have an implicit bias towards them does dull the queerness somewhat. It doesn't remove it entirely, just it is frustrating.
Then again I personally do find it frustrating when we can't talk to characters deeply about what both they and I want and enjoy their company in various ways, so I think the problem is one of nuance and variability which can be extremely difficult to do in relationships in games because systematising relationships and the all or nothing of conventional relationship structures/philosophies (monogamy) makes it difficult to have or do in games, I have never really seen a game pull off relationships in general well, even those that let you have any form of nonmonogamy are still focused on the player's agency for the most part, not that of the characters.
I would love to be able to have conversations about consent, see and respect character's autonomy and actually spend time doing more than sex or kissing with friends, partners etc in games.
The only four games where I enjoyed relationships with characters so far have been:
But sadly these kinds of relationships are lacking in games, just making a character queer isn't enough imo and developers should really try not to make it a linear path where you give them enough gifts or do enough actions that they like and a relationship/sex/whatever falls out, but I do not know how possible that is unless/even if you spend along time really thinking about and implimenting these things.
We have come a long way, but we do have a long way to go still and just who or how a character is interested in doesn't really seem like it matters much in the grand scheme of things when there's much more nuance and agency that could be given to them and the relationships you have with them in general both agency and nuance for the characters and the player.