Landing in the Hot Zone - The Steve Cortez Discussion Thread

I like Steve! He's a good dude. And one day I'll romance him

I say the same for Samantha. Maybe if the trilogy is ever remade, Steve and Samantha will be included from the beginning

MEHEM with Steve

Love BroShep/Cortez and love the chemistry they have for each other. Cortez should have existed in the game from the start.

Thankfully, this site didn't auto-censor Matthew Del Negro's name like the old BSN.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a die hard Kaidan lover. But for romance, I thought Cortez was waaay more emotionally intimate. I finally romanced him this last play through and he seriously made me melt more than a few times. I found I kept asking myself why it had taken me so long to do this. Compared to Cortez, Kaidan's m/m romance felt much more shallow. To me, anyway.

It's hard for me to pick between Steve and Kaidan. I feel like they both have very good storylines. I do feel like Steve's dead spouse trope makes the beginning a bit harder to take then Kaidan's story. However the same could be said it's hard to take the fact that Kaidan talks about how attractive women are quite a few times during the series-making him seem more player sexual then actually bisexual.

I do at the end of the day give the win to Kaidan, and I am not even sure why. Maybe it's just as simple as the fact that I can take him with me on missions and he gets that one extra scene (the beam run) that Cortez doesn't. Either way though both romances are quite nice!

I'm okay with Steve but if I let Shepard die then I feel like I'm really screwing the guy over.  Then he's lost not one, but two loves in maybe the length of a year.  Not very nice if for someone you love.  Kaidan, I assumed, was something along the lines of pansexual, which is how I play my Shepard.  The attraction is more to the person than the body.  So Kaidan can appreciate the female form (he notices EDI, for example) but he's never going to have an interest in dating her - no personality meshing.  With Shepard it's different.  He'll be attracted to who Shepard is as a human being.  The rest follows.  And the Apollo's conversation definitely suggests Kaidan is interested in sex with Shepard regardless of gender.

I definitely will let my Shepard live happily ever after with Steve, because there's only so much tragedy I can enjoy, and my Shepard will be an unlucky guy before as well They really deserve some happiness.

I also played my Shepard similar to yours with Kaidan. I really enjoyed it a lot.

I really liked how caring Steve was. The joyride with him in the Citadel DLC made me like him even more.

If didn't know, this is why she never got any dialogue for Leviathan.

I don't think the dead spouse trope was a factor. Thane have one (the fact that he kept remembering sex with his dead wife doesn't seem to bother many of his fans) and he have a son as well.

I think there will be more Cortez fans if he was a facescanned character.


perhaps if someone modded Kaidan's sex scene with their romance maybe.

Well, I think there are probably quite a bit of players that are/were put-off by the literal "crying over his dead husband" -- especially considering he's the first gay male romance in the series. Maybe the only one available if Kaidan isn't around. He's also a new character and not a squadmate which can make the romance seem less significant in comparison to others who have a history with Shep and can go on missions, like Kaidan.

I like Thane, and his romance, too, but there are still those that would rather avoid "replacing" his dead wife. A difference for Thane is that his wife died many years ago, when Kolyat was a child (and he doesn't ever specifically or repeatedly talk about sex with his wife, actually). I feel that Thane is living more in long-standing regret than immediate depression. Cortez lost his husband only 6 months prior and is still obviously grieving. They both have baggage (what character doesn't?  ), but Cortez's is still kinda raw and Shepard, as usual, has to help him work through it before they can get together. I can see how that's awkward. I did think it was awkward at first, but it's not so difficult for me to get past.

So I wouldn't change Cortez's appearance either, and I'm not concerned with sex scenes in games (though I do believe that equal content for LIs is ideal). I'd have preferred an actual conversation before Cronos Station like with Kaidan/Liara, rather than "Hey there, lets pass the time together" and then fade-to-back...