playersexual should be the default because the people taking the default option probably don't have anything to say about anything and the relationships are side-content to some main quest in a game that is about strategy and/or dexterity challenges. mass effect was broadly not elevated by having set orientations. New vegas was but they wrote better and had something to say about the BoS.

if you're doing something purposeful with with the relationships then you should make actual decisions about them, and can do powerful things with your narrative about whatever experiences you're depicting. I don't think anyone anywhere seriously says you shouldn't.

saint's row 4 has by far the best in-game relationships in a game that isn't a dating sim or primarily focused on those relationships.

Depends on the game. If there's only a handful of romance options playersexual design allows your character a range of options, but if there's a wide range of characters to romance having set sexualities allows them to have more detailed personalities and preferences.
I general though, I prefer neither - I don't mind the romance in most of the games I've played, but don't usually find it particularly adds anything important.

Stardew Valley is one of my favorite games, but I don't like that befriending each of the romanceable characters inevitably leads to romance. At the very least, you should have some choice about if you want to smooch them before you give them so many shiny rocks and your smooch stat exceeds the smooch threshold.

Not to sound like a broken record, but there's one character in Genshin Impact that has a fixed sexuality. I don't know if I want to spoil it. Compared to the rest of the characters, who are all "playersexual", at least as playersexual as you can get in a children's game, her fixed sexuality was a welcome change.

It'd be fun (and angering the gamers) and realistic if there were more romance paths, dialogue options, etc. for certain characters that end up with them saying "no, not interested" - for example

Open world games have now annoyed me because everything needs to be opened ended, and most of their fans get upset at “shoving politics” or whatever nonsense. I get it’s a game, but if it has a narrative and not just some Mario jumping on a goomba, then why can’t it have fixed outcomes and characters? Who gives a shit if it’s an interactive medium? Fixed stories have been around since the beginning of games and now all of a sudden it’s bad because you can’t say x or do y in a couple games.

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.

Why can’t a character be uninterested in you unless you’re a different gender? I don’t understand why we have to remove them from the dating pool just because they’ll never date you lol. How is having restricted romance options due to your gender any different than being redistricted romance/endings due to your in game choices, or being restricted items and abilities due to your class?

It’s kind of pointless to add “artificial intelligence” to your game if none of these characters have intelligence and their world revolves around you.

With that being said, I don’t mind mods that change their sexuality to whatever. It doesn’t bother me. People have been doing non-canonical sexuality shipping since forever.

I think the first tweet is the kind of argument that sounds good at first but falls apart the more you think about it. Sexuality can be a big part of a character, but it isn't always. I think making such a sweeping statement is quite ignorant, actually.

let people do their own thing, set sexuality is rigid definitions that do not truly define the spectrum

Unless the tone of the game is designed to have high heights and heart-crushing pits of despair replicating the experience of asking someone out who is not also gay does not seem like a good design goal.

Basically, unless you’re actually using it as a theme stay the fuck away from it. It actually kind of grosses me out that people want to just yeet fixed sexualities in there without thinking about the reasons WHY people have them IRL. ~~Like, the fuck, do you want to model straight men creeping on lesbians in your game? You better be treating that with the gravity it actually implies if you are, you’re not getting a fluffy dating side game if you do that.~~ Edit: I don’t think this point is really relevant lmao, and is mostly inflammatory. Ignore it

From the perspective of the player, it’s always going to feel absolutely unfair, which sure, you can go for and can be extremely good in a game where that makes sense, but it opens you up to issues like making a queer-coded character on accident and then having characters complain about them not being romanceable as a queer person.

Also, if I can play the gay card, it feels extremely uncomfortable to make characters of set sexualities in pretty much any game, because I don’t trust G*mer developers to handle it well with non-binary identities. It sure would be “fun” to be rejected by a lesbian character or a straight man because I chose the wrong character facial hair option or something, despite designing my character as a woman.

If you remove “gendered” options (like choosing from a male or female gender in character creation) from character creation, in fact, this entire concept is just silly. You would have to basically design physical attraction preferences for every romanceable character. And while “player freedom” is of course not the MOST important thing, most people don’t want to log on to a game to do a romance with the NPC they have the hots for, only to be rejected for choosing the wrong hairstyle, or being the wrong playable species. That could be fun but you’d have to basically design the game around those themes, you couldn’t just slap that on a story with romance and assume players would feel ok with it.

I would only trust a team of entirely queer people to write a game with fixed sexual identities and a proper character creation system that includes non-binary people at the same time, and even then, only if it’s being done with an actual purpose in mind and not just because they need to ~~maintain an extremely strict gender and sexuality binary~~ give what would end up being really shitty representation.

Any game where players are given binary gender choices, I suppose fixed sexualities are acceptable, but FUCK that shit in any game with a proper character creation system (as in, without dumb binary gender options), specifically in the ring of romance. If a character isn’t dateable they should always have a fixed sexuality (or unmentioned I guess, but it seems like an important character trait).

Edit 2: Actually, I think having set sexualities with non-binary player characters could work if you turned it around for the non-binary characters and give the player the option to choose whether they would or would not date straight people, gay people, etc. That way they could choose themselves what experience would represent their character the most accurately. Depending on the flavor of the choice you could make it possible for the player character to make exceptions on people they’ll date because the setting could be an actual in character choice of who they’ll date, or not if the setting is just there to determine how you want other characters to be attracted to them (or not).