How *unappealing* do you predict straight male romance options will be in DA4?

Frankly I can't believe it's only 26 (now 29) pages long. In the heyday of this sort of thing back on the old site it'd have had 10x that by now.

Dumpster fires are more like dustbin fires nowadays.  Need a new game with more ugly, mannish and lesbian romances already.

Oh yes, muscle tone! One thing I appreciated about Aveline's character model. She definitely looked a little more built under her armor than the other female characters.

It's not that Cass has a bad personality or anything. I know folks who eat that up. I just prefer my LIs more rogueish, I guess.


I'm always here for more lesbians.


Yep, just one of those things where it's different strokes for different folks. I know people who romanced Alistair/Leliana + Sebastian + Cullen/Cassandra because they loooove the devout ones.

My Inquisitor who romanced Cass was an non-believing elven mage.    <-- also my canon Inquisitor

I really liked them together, especially because they were so different.


I do have a faithful Inquisitor, but as much as I love her, it's so hard to play her. 
Really the only reason why I have a faithful Inquisitor, is becuse I want that stupid Griffon Plate Armor Schematic

Couldn't agree more. While I like Cullen in DAI far better than in the other two games, where he mostly pissed me off, I find Solas very boring. Not what I did
expect from a trickster god.

But it all comes down to personal taste so I think 'live and let live'. I don't care for characters like Alistair, Morrigan, Solas or Merril, others do. So as long as there are appealing characters for me, like Zevran, Iron Bull, Blackwall, Sera (who has a surprisingly good romance), Isabella... why should I grudge about those other in my eyes wasted spots mentioned above, when I know, that a lot of people like them?

I'm beginning to understand that, when reading threads like this one - although for most part it stayed surprisingly civil

Yes. I only find it aggravating when I don't have characters that appeal to me, or when I am gated from romancing them. I would have nothing against Bull and Blackwall, if I was not barred from romancing all three of Dorian, Cullen and Solas. Hence my beef with the Inquisition are its rigid gates that really corner the female PC in a racial aspect. I just got caught in my opposing tastes. I like those characters to romance, but I do not like playing a male or an elf. It's an impasse, and compromising on one of the likes makes playing the game less enjoyable. And the reason why I find both Bull and Blackwall more irritating that they would have been otherwise. Because the game suggests that the character I created should be romantically attracted to them to be loved back; but everyone I think she likes rejects her based on her race, and despite her actual appearances and character.

It really, really bugs me that three out of three males I like, and 3 out of the 5 total, all of them having the romances included with the game, are gated for my character. I actually like more romantic options than I dislike, and the game still manages to gate me out.

Both DAO and DA2 manage to blow it out of the water, and then out of the air with only two romances per game.

The game isn't locking you out of anything, you are doing that yourself.
It's not the games fault you are unable to roleplay anything else except one character.

Two. One male, one female, each of which is someone I have totally invested in and love to bits. That’s how I play my games, and I really love the Qunari, how they look and how they feel. I waited for two games to play one & I would have played more of them if F!Qunari was not out of options. I strongly disagree that there should be one true way to play the game.

(Shrug) I did play the game your preferred way, by creating that “Mancer” character y’all are so fond of. So, yes, I played the blessed female elf, for the full game, all 50 hours of it, a gold star sticker. I just did not like it. It always felt like a compromise and not my game. I think I will always regret doing it, creating a character to just see a romance. Starting a character concept with a "She must be a girl-elf, so I can see Solas and Cullen's romances" is not really my thing.

I am not happy about being gated. I want it to be like DA2.

Of course, I also had such incredible expectations when I saw that I can play a Qunari and romance one, that the disappointment was particularly crashing. I am happy for all the players that always wanted a casual romance with a lot of sexual innuendo and peculiar sexual practices. But yeah, there goes my one male Qunari rom.

I can’t believe that i love the games where I can only play humans more because they feel far more welcoming of my choices and tastes.

Just like people can’t get it what’s so bad about playing an elf to romance someone, I don’t get it how people could actually want the gates. I tried it your way, and i don’t see the attraction. I much prefer the full freedom of character creation, and that character being able to engage in a lovestory that I want for him or her.

Better luck next time, I guess, and fingers crossed.

Well, I can only speak to my own views, but I like the gates because it makes the person seem more real. People have preferences.

Let's ignore Cullen for now, since there are a whole host of issues there that I'm not going to get into. With Solas, the race gating was intentional due to his character. If you play as a non-elf, even if you are "friends" and he likes you, he still has contempt for you as a lesser being; heck, that partly applies to elves as well, since they're still not his elves. Solas believes that all post-Veil beings are stunted. The whole "elven glory" thing with him is a meme at this point, but it's true. I think that those sorts of differences, when written into a character, can make for some interesting dynamics.


You're not guaranteed to like every romance option. Even if they were all bi and not race-gated, there is no guarantee that you would like them. I don't romance anyone in DAO; that's just how it goes. There are many people that didn't like any of the DA2 options, deeming them all imbalanced in some way. Again, that's just how it goes.

I don't support either approach, playersexuality or gates. The approach I support is good writing trumps all. If it's the right call for the story to have no romances, that's fine with me. If, on the other hand, the story needs a non-stop pansexual orgy, I'm all for it.

This is not to say that there should be no player agency, far from it. The degree to which I'm willing to sacrifice my agency is proportional to how good the writing is. Bioware writing trends very good to great, so I'm willing to give up a lot. Plus, and perhaps this is key, I'm willing to subordinate my player creation choices to extract the best possible story content. If I need to play a gay elf in order to unlock one piece of juicy content, sign me up. If I then need to play an asexual Qunari Tal-Vashoth to get some other bit of juicy content, where do I sign?

But that's just me, of course, though it does seem to me that if you patronize a studio that specializes in writing great stories, you should expect to make some sacrifices. It's only fair.

They did kinda fix that, at least with Trespasser, IIRC.
I mostly agree that any sort of personal investment with Solas works just about as well whether as a friend or a romance, regardless, and what romance elements there were are pretty bare bones compared to the others I've seen, so I think playing a female elf just for him is kinda shooting oneself in the foot (and this is coming from someone whose first Inquisitor was, in fact, a female elf, just for him...kinda).

Heck, I even dislike mods that change a character's appearance to a great degree, or to such a degree that they look unlike themselves or even veer away from their personality.

For example, while the image is pretty hot, I really don't envision Dorian allowing himself to grow stubble and look unkempt, like the Dorian in the Rough mod.