Oh exactly. Bioware has actually been inconsistent in that regard - I thought ME:A was doing better with romances for straight males (Peebee, Vastra and Cora) after DA:I only had Cassandra and Josephine (the latter of which was a council member and so was around less) but of course it was great for same sex stuff between the Iron Bull and Dorian and Sera. So yeah. 
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The same can be said for Reyes, who was my favorite romance option in that game. I wanted more Reyes, dammit.
That, I think, is fairly easy to rectify, especially in a game where you have a larger party. Split the party up and let the MC choose who to go with (while still giving options to get closer friendships with the other NPCs at times, without having to choose between the RO and the buddies).
It’s funny, I was all ready to complain that straight women got shafted to (no pun intended 
), with only Cullen and Iron Bull as options (and what options they are!) but then remembered Blackwall (who I found blech, both physically and personality-wise) and Solas (who is a racist and will only hook up with female elves, so meh). So yeah, you guys definitely got screwed in that game!
It did strike me, though, just how much being able to choose matters, because In DA:I, I wanted to be able romance Dorian (because he’s awesome) and in ME:A, I wanted a shot at Gil. By the same token, I saw people unhappy because, as males, they couldn’t romance Cullen. In one respect, I get it–these characters are who they are and shouldn’t be forced to bend to players’ wishes in the game. In another respect… I wanted my MC to be able to romance them, dammit!
In the end, staying true to the character really matters more than anything, because altering the characters to suit the player makes the characters too bland and takes away from the very foundation of who they are. But then, I’m more of a character-driven person than a plot-driven (if the characters won’t cooperate, you just have to find another way to push the plot in the general direction you want!).
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But with representation of gender and sexuality, authors should take into account if they’re shafting a particular audience when it comes to screentime. Ignoring the fact that ME:A was a homophobic mess—if the only gay characters are bound to a location the player simply won’t be in the majority of the time, that’s a problem in the same way that a game having a male-skewed cast is a problem.
I think that’s why the common Choice of Games method of having gender variant ROs or gender-flippable casts (à la Broadsides) works so well. It’s an easy way to ensure representation. In an ideal world, we could have genderlocked games that represent everyone equally, but in practice, the scope can become…unmanageable. (Also, of course, ignoring the fact that it is just entirely impossible to represent every variation of gender and sexuality in a single work to begin with.)
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As fun as this could be, this is sadly not very doable in a choice / hosted games. Bioware games often has one (or more) writers in charge of a character and/or a quest and they have a lot of writers which mean that they can write all those variables.
Choice/hosted are one person project more often than not. The differene between a character who can be there and a chacter who can NOT be there is huge. And if we have a whole party and thus potentially combinations…
…its one of those things with can be done, but rarely is because it is much more difficult than it sounds.
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TLDR: maybe rather than gender locked make it character locked
Maybe someone else has said something like this idk 
This might be a weird take but I think if you take away choices like gender you should completely take away our choice of who that character is. The more customization at the beginning the more one would want to make their character differ. But if you say this is goober mcgoo a small girl with red hair from the mountains by Belgium then I’m invested in goober and I want to know where her story goes.
Like how in the Witcher, we can make choices and choose how Geralt reacts but at the end it’s Geralt’s story not my Witcher mc’s story. Add to that we can choose what he wears and how he styles his hair but we can’t change the color of his hair or eyes, or his physique or even where he’s from or what his past was.
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I would prefer gender-choice, too. For my part It’s really rare to play a gender locked game. I like playing male MC. Of course the most CoG which are gender-locked have male MC but for some reason I still can’t enjoy them. Like if I had the choice I would still take a male MC but I don’t want to be forced to play a certain way. Even if it’s more realistic in some settings I think it’s tiresome. One point is the same as @marimarsbar already stated. Either take a full fleshed character or make them blank. But many games with genderlocked MC make halfhearthed choices. Were you can still choose the personality but every now and then when we can’t choose we see the “canon” personality. And if we don’t choose some personality based choices we get punished for not being the Char the author wanted. Also I don’t want to play an IF that’s in the best case has a sexist world and in worst case (which likely never happened so far) a sexist author. That’s more a subjective thing but I don’t want gritty realism. I want to enjoy reading and have fun. If I want to see a world where people are sexist or die of cancer or people get abused I just can look at the real world. Making your world darker and more realistic doesn’t mean it’s more “mature” (but that just my opinion. Of course there are a lot fans of darker and realistic worlds)
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I don’t know what I find harder to believe. That this five year old thread is still going strong, or that I managed to read through it all again.
Plus the whole cheap baby plot which reeked of an inferior knockoff of bad 90’s sitcoms with gay, but not too gay characters on top of the fact that that main gay RO also had no unique model like most of the other romances. With the bisexual guy the content for guys was similarly half-assed using the female dance scenes and being called a “queen”. 
True, as for Hosted Games I hope that @daydreamsincolor will provide more opportunities to go into the crucial fights/moments in the second and third books with the non-suitemate ro’s (Alty and Cy for me) as companions by the mc’s side.
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I like Astrid and Kol personally.
I don’t remember that baby plot in ME:A, what was that (or when and whom?). Game was good but not THAT good (not meh but… well… it has not mark me with a vivid memory, same for DA:I)
It’s very difficult for me to get into a genderlocked game. Rarely do I ever really play a game that doesn’t at least allow you to customize the player character. And usually it’s got nothing to do with the game or story itself, just my desire for a more immersive story–which I feel is amplified if you had control over what your player character looks like. Games like Kingdom Hearts that lack that aspect work for me because I have a history with it. And Sekiro, which is a newer title, I found myself enjoying but it falls under the same specific umbrella I have for games where it’s “this is good but it’d be nice to play as X or you could customize how X looks.” I didn’t play Fallen Order specifically because of the genderlock which it has and instead watched a playthrough of it and I would ultimately put ut under that same umbrella. I feel like Genderlocking a game is up to the creator, ultimately. If that’s the story they want to tell, then I can’t be upset about that, it’s their story and a story for those who like X. But for me, genderlocking anything steers me away from it.
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I just played the whip Shattered Eagle and in it society has very rigid gender views and ideas on what roles each gender should have this is reinforced by religious dogma and as a result certain choices are blocked based on what gender you are. You also cannot be NB because the story has you in a higher position within society which wouldn’t be possible for someone whose gender falls outside of that societies norms. I really enjoyed it and i even went to play the female mc to experience the other way the game can be played. I personally don’t mind and to an extent enjoy games that are gender locked especially when it is relevant to the story (like the infinity saga and donor). What do y’all think about gender locked games, games with gender locked choices, or just games where your gender has an impact on the way the story is told. Love em, hate em?
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Depends on a setting, depends on the author. Saw some people genderlocking their stuff for no particular reason, saw situations where it made sense. I’m generally neutral about the whole matter.
But what I really like are the small nods to your gender. Hard to do for non-binary people, but possible.
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People largely misunderstand why queerness was taboo for so long. It mostly has to do with religious bigotry, not just that things were always bad in the past. So what, specifically, caused this society to have authoritarian gender roles? If it’s just stated “there’s religious dogma so no nonbinaries!” for the purpose of keeping things simple for the author, but the religious dogma is not delved into deeper in the story, then it seems like a cop out
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So every time an author wants to portray a society that views gender differently from (the progressive subset of) our culture, they must then delve deeply into the religious dogma of that society? Because that sounds exhausting.
Shattered Eagle is explicitely based on the late Roman Empire. I think that’s reason enough for why nobility only has men and women. I don’t need a detailed explanation of why the culture isn’t friendly to non-binary people anymore than I need an explanation for why there’s slavery or why we get no wi-fi. You’re playing in discount Rome, the “authoritarian gender roles” come with the territory.
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That sounds like an overreaction. I was talking about if a story only used the religious dogma for that one purpose and then didn’t mention it again.
That’s all I needed to know. I admit, I hadn’t checked out the story
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That’s fair and makes sense the book is based off of the Roman Empire and it does into how the religion and culture more than just a cop out. When playing a male mc your character has an opportunity during a religious ceremony to criticise the religion and question why it says men are unfit to lead in comparison to their fellow women. I think it does a good job of showing us how the religion and culture affects society and not just saying so.
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Religious doctrine is something that’s explored significantly in Shattered Eagle, especially in Chapter II. Personally I’ve always been interested in how religion, politics, and culture intersect throughout history, and while creating the setting’s matriarchal religion I tried to keep in mind how certain organized religions have used gender as a social cleavage to secure power over their adherents.
Even so, there is significantly more nuance in gender roles in the Church of Gaia compared to many other organized religions in real life Late Antiquity. Men can attain certain high offices, as a M!MC attests to, though they cannot rise in the Church or study sorcery, so the Sorceress career option is gender locked to a F!MC.
There is a measure of tolerance for certain transgender people who meet the strict standards of the Church, which is why that’s an option for MCs to choose from in character creation. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a significant amount of discrimination for a transgender MC to overcome, however. I found it was a lot more difficult to justify a non-binary MC considering the worldbuilding I was working on, so I wasn’t able to implement that in the game.
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I agree that you really don’t need to go deeply into the “why” of every worldbuilding decision, though obviously each time you do, the setting is richer for it.
If a game is genderlocked, I’ll decide whether or not that’s a flaw based on the merits of the individual case. Is there a reason they’re doing it (usually a Doylist one, not a Watsonian one)? Is it an attempt to use a historical setting or (as in SE) a pastiche of one, or of an existing fantasy setting with strict gender roles? Are we talking about the Infiniverse, where Paul’s writing about power relationships and thus the MC’s role is constrained to a male character? Is it just the writer’s misogyny showing? Et cetera.
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I feel like the gender dynamic is a concept that hasn’t been explored enough, if anything, it’s another reason I consider I, the forgotten one a huge favorite of mine
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Where there’s gender-based prejudice in games, I like seeing how characters who experience that prejudice live in the setting. There are a lot of female characters with various levels of power/influence in the Infinityverse, for example; in the flippable patriarchies/matriarchies in Broadsides and Pendragon Rising, there are characters like Morgan le Fay who aren’t the PC’s gender and are navigating the world in their own ways.
A non-game example: I loved rereading Hild by Nicola Griffith recently. It’s an excellent book about a Medieval woman in the role of a king’s visionary that also shows plenty of less unusual, still very interesting, women living in a male-dominated society.
I don’t know whether any nonbinary characters appear in the matriarchal setting of the Shattered Eagle WIP, but it would be interesting to see NPCs living outside social gender norms, or seeing some effects of living within them.
It really depends on the author, game, and setting though. Sometimes it might be tedious, sometimes it might be compelling.
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