In the first game everyone is assumed to be straight, and your character receives a stat boost from sleeping with women, which sometimes happens in the story, but mostly will happen at “bathhouses”.
This is more or less the same in the second game, except that there is an option relatively early in the game for your (male) character to start a gay romance with an important, recurring character.
I didn’t follow through with that, but I was very pleasantly surprised to see it - both characters are sort of supposed to be womanizers, but it makes sense in the context of the story that they could discover feelings for eachother. It’s up to you whether your character has a childhood sweetheart feminine love interest at home or not (from the previous game), but other than this relatively unimportant detail (beyond the roleplaying of it), the gay romance appears to be arguably the most significant romance in the game.
All that said, the game director who speaks is an asshole. Given that, I was pleasantly surprised at how “woke” KCD2 actually is. Guess he might has a different idea of “woke” than the rest of us, e.g. more “female ghost busters movie”, less “gay representation”.
scholar@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
The game has a gay romance option, which is something that you can unlock over the course of the game with the right dialogue options and is fairly tastefully done. The game is very intent on being a 1403 simulator and the characters are all written with that in mind, but it’s nice that the game recognises that gay people would have existed regardless of the cultural attitudes at the time.
I think his comments refer to the implementation of the romance in the way that it doesn’t feel like it was put there so the studio could boast about how progressive they are.
tabris@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
The late mediaeval period was actually fairly accepting of gay relationships, with a legal doctrine of Brotherment being practiced in several countries, where two men would legally join their lives and assets, and which often included declarations of affection.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Big “I’m doing the thing I complain about, but it’s different when I do it” energy from this statement.
scholar@lemmy.world 4 minutes ago
It looks like he’s really commenting on the way these relationships are portrayed in KCD2 compared to other games, but he doesn’t specify which other games he’s on about so it’s hard to say exactly what he’s referring to other than a general perception of modern media lazily inserting LGBT characters without integrating them more deeply into the setting or narrative.