You’d need to write some amount of differing blurbs depending on player gender
Extremely loud incorrect buzzer noise. The easy solution would just be to make everyone gay, which really would sort it out. For what it’s worth you can also write bi or even pansexual characters, but they have to be believable about it. Pans better actually reflect attraction regardless of gender, is all, instead of this numb lifeless thing that bends to the player.
you need distinct friendship cutscenes for any character that potentially won’t go out with the player.
I mean, do you? The idea of platonic “social links” is not a bad one but the Harvest Moon games never had it to my knowledge, so you could always just cut this. Plus, if you’re feeling brave you’d have the ability to keep it platonicstyle with characters of compatible gender, to avoid amatonomrativity. That would be even more work, though, because actually fully reflecting gender and romance and shit is pretty hard, which is probably why Stardew just takes the least-resistance approach of “minimum flexibility required for whatever the player wants”.
I remember the ‘everyone dates everyone’ feel of it fondly and not as a negative. Certainly better then having to play male Shepard to date Tali in Mass Effect.
I mean, have you ever heard anyone gripe about this before now? I’m a weird little freak and I hate joy. First off, I did not even know you could bed Tali, that’s hilarious. Also though… Why not just play ManShep if that’s your bag…? She’s a straight lady, do you wanna date a straight lady?
Fwiw Mass Effect does actually gate romance path by gender, which goes to show that you have to do more than just that to be good. I also sailed through my first ME playthroughs without even the implication of romance from any of the characters, which was weird and kinda funny.
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Extremely loud incorrect buzzer noise. The easy solution would just be to make everyone gay, which really would sort it out. For what it’s worth you can also write bi or even pansexual characters, but they have to be believable about it. Pans better actually reflect attraction regardless of gender, is all, instead of this numb lifeless thing that bends to the player.
I mean, do you? The idea of platonic “social links” is not a bad one but the Harvest Moon games never had it to my knowledge, so you could always just cut this. Plus, if you’re feeling brave you’d have the ability to keep it platonicstyle with characters of compatible gender, to avoid amatonomrativity. That would be even more work, though, because actually fully reflecting gender and romance and shit is pretty hard, which is probably why Stardew just takes the least-resistance approach of “minimum flexibility required for whatever the player wants”.
I mean, have you ever heard anyone gripe about this before now? I’m a weird little freak and I hate joy. First off, I did not even know you could bed Tali, that’s hilarious. Also though… Why not just play ManShep if that’s your bag…? She’s a straight lady, do you wanna date a straight lady?
Fwiw Mass Effect does actually gate romance path by gender, which goes to show that you have to do more than just that to be good. I also sailed through my first ME playthroughs without even the implication of romance from any of the characters, which was weird and kinda funny.
ⓘ Remember to enable JPEG-XL support in your browser, even on your phone!