"No Brothels to be in DA4" as per Mark Darrah Tweet.

How times have changed since BioWare put brothels into Hordes of the Underdark but had to get rid of them (and a few other things) at Hasbro's request. How Gaider snarked about hyperventilating publishers afterwards.

Who's doing the hyperventilating now, I wonder...

That's the reason The Witcher was successful, we don't know much about the game yet.

A game does not require sex to be Mature. Nor is it expected of a rated M game since most M games don't have sex in them. 

Oh that's just great... More fuel for those who think BW are a bunch of SJW wusses...

I was not always a fan of Gaider... but he was usually true to the art. His exit from BW probably has more to do with the creeping political correctness than BW is admitting.

The atmosphere of a section of a town can't be separate from atmosphere of an actual story of a game. So yes - an inclusion of brothel and all it implies may greatly impact atmosphere of a town... but not if that town happens to be besieged or overran by invading army, or if part of the city is in a riot or there's some fort of magical cataclysm happening and so on.

Then there are of course design priorities shaped by the story - we only saw small section of the city in DAI, because it wasn't important to show more of it and it'd be utterly bizarre to get access to a section whose only reason to exist in the story is to... get to access to brothels, wut? From that standpoint a 'simple pleasure' becomes this strange, prominent feature that was important to be put in game over anything else. Nevermind that, for variety of reasons, it'd be way more convenient and less risky (politically and whatnot) to just discretely hire prostitutes or high-end courtesans to visit Inquisitor in a mansion they stay or something.
Nope, they didn't. Though there are more ways to witness or experience sex trade than just visiting a brothel - though, again, it depends where the story will take us and how much of a priority it actually is. There are multiple ways to portray a decadent, power-hungry, corrupt culture steeped in blood magic and gruesome ways how it affects its victims. How, and how much, we're going to see it so far remains an unknown.

Another thing - it'd be prudent to take much of what Mark Darrah posts on his Twitter with a grain of salt. The guy is known to troll people and give humorous responses that are neither here or there, including joking about completely 'forgetting' all about important characters when people ask if they're going to show up in next game. And from the look of it, they've recently fully embraced the fact that people are going to take whatever they write or post and warp it ten times over. Just look at his responses to people asking about the 'leak'.

I'm not sure I follow...?

What do decorative assets, like empty buildings, have to do with a brothel? ... And how do you know that there weren't some brothels in some of the empty buildings we couldn't enter?

Well, you don't know that because creating a brothel that we could say is a brothel (or an inn, or a shop, or a ratcatcher) requires way more work than creating an empty building we can't enter - and I don't think people would be any happier if all they got is a locked door with a word 'BROTHEL!" above it. In fact I can already hear the complains in my head.

The role of buildings we couldn't enter in DAO and DA was purely decorative, in the most basic sense of the word. A literal filler in a game that featured cities we could traverse a bit to get from point A to point B and alleys where we were ambushed. We didn't get those in DAI, aside from the market and tiny sections for specific quests.

Also... I don't understand the whole 'should they actually make Val Royeaux smaller'? Where does it come from? I'm fairly sure I didn't say anything about making Val Royeaux smaller - only that it'd be very bizarre for the game that had no time or reason to show us more than large marketplace and then present us with anther hand-crafted section of town which either main or sole reason of existence would be... entering a brothel.

It'd be head-scratching to say the least, nevermind that it'd open a completely new can of worms in terms of asking ourselves about narrative or RP priorities of the game, or why other sections or activities weren't featured too, if they had time (did they? I just got my copy of "Blood, Sweat and Pixels" book which has a chapter dedicated to development of DAI and it seemed to be LITERAL HELL with it being a near-miracle that the game is as good as it is considering all the obstacles on their way) to put in something that was never really consequential to any story in any DA game and only featured in games that had bigger sections of cities present or actually happened mostly in the city.

I tried to hint at this in another thread. Bioware is no longer that dev that gamers and media gave a free pass because their games were so great and industry leading such as BG, ME1, and KOTOR. This is why releasing DA4 in the same window as 2077 could be a bad decision.

Of course people will disagree but the momentum is in the favor of CDPR, not Bioware. I expect DA4 to be a superior game to MEA, but if other games are advancing at a faster rate and Bioware not being able to keep up, EA may pull the plug on Bioware and have then soley focus on Anthem.

When I hear "Bioware can't make an interesting city without incorporating brothels." my mind translates it to, "I have a lack of imagination and think people having sex in another room is edgier than having a pedicure done."

When I hear "Bioware can't compete with CDPR." my mind translates that to "I have played a different game and now think all games should be that game."

When I hear "Bioware has been undermined by political correctness and SJWs" my mind translates that to "I really don't think that anyone should make games that appeal to people who are not me and my straight, white, middle-class 18-25-year-old friends. If my mom would have fun playing this game, I would lose my shit."

So that's the camp I'm in.

Blinded? People have a different opinion than yours, get over it.

But it is a fact that DAI is nowhere near the level of grotesque of DA2 and DAO. I mean DAI has its moments, but nowhere near the level of the previous two games. Hell, even Patrick Weekes made reference to this and how it shapes their writing.