Unless the tone of the game is designed to have high heights and heart-crushing pits of despair replicating the experience of asking someone out who is not also gay does not seem like a good design goal.

Basically, unless you’re actually using it as a theme stay the fuck away from it. It actually kind of grosses me out that people want to just yeet fixed sexualities in there without thinking about the reasons WHY people have them IRL. Like, the fuck, do you want to model straight men creeping on lesbians in your game? You better be treating that with the gravity it actually implies if you are, you’re not getting a fluffy dating side game if you do that. Edit: I don’t think this point is really relevant lmao, and is mostly inflammatory. Ignore it

From the perspective of the player, it’s always going to feel absolutely unfair, which sure, you can go for and can be extremely good in a game where that makes sense, but it opens you up to issues like making a queer-coded character on accident and then having characters complain about them not being romanceable as a queer person.

Also, if I can play the gay card, it feels extremely uncomfortable to make characters of set sexualities in pretty much any game, because I don’t trust G*mer developers to handle it well with non-binary identities. It sure would be “fun” to be rejected by a lesbian character or a straight man because I chose the wrong character facial hair option or something, despite designing my character as a woman.

If you remove “gendered” options (like choosing from a male or female gender in character creation) from character creation, in fact, this entire concept is just silly. You would have to basically design physical attraction preferences for every romanceable character. And while “player freedom” is of course not the MOST important thing, most people don’t want to log on to a game to do a romance with the NPC they have the hots for, only to be rejected for choosing the wrong hairstyle, or being the wrong playable species. That could be fun but you’d have to basically design the game around those themes, you couldn’t just slap that on a story with romance and assume players would feel ok with it.

I would only trust a team of entirely queer people to write a game with fixed sexual identities and a proper character creation system that includes non-binary people at the same time, and even then, only if it’s being done with an actual purpose in mind and not just because they need to maintain an extremely strict gender and sexuality binary give what would end up being really shitty representation.

Any game where players are given binary gender choices, I suppose fixed sexualities are acceptable, but FUCK that shit in any game with a proper character creation system (as in, without dumb binary gender options), specifically in the ring of romance. If a character isn’t dateable they should always have a fixed sexuality (or unmentioned I guess, but it seems like an important character trait).

Edit 2: Actually, I think having set sexualities with non-binary player characters could work if you turned it around for the non-binary characters and give the player the option to choose whether they would or would not date straight people, gay people, etc. That way they could choose themselves what experience would represent their character the most accurately. Depending on the flavor of the choice you could make it possible for the player character to make exceptions on people they’ll date because the setting could be an actual in character choice of who they’ll date, or not if the setting is just there to determine how you want other characters to be attracted to them (or not).