This discourse was going around twitter today apparently and im curious takes from here.
Which is it for you?
For me i prefer playersexuality. I want to be able to romance any romance option regardless of my charachters gender. I dont want to be stuck with only Arcade Gannon if i want to do m/m
I agree that sexuality can be important to a charachter. But if you wanna do that, seems like the charachter can just not be a romance option.
That said. In RPGs devs can do what they want. You want a charachter to be monosexual and a romance option, have at it. (Unless theyre all straight, then fuck you).
I do kinda hate what The Sims did by adding monosexuality. Felt like such a virtue signal that made the game less fun. All Sims being pansexual was always more fun for me. Especially since i usually play that game as a pansexual slut. Unless i decide my player Sim is mono, but thats on the player's end.
Monosexual townies in the Sims should at least be optional (is it? Idk havent played Sims 4 since this update).
I personally think it's essential to have sexuality as a hard feature because it's a necessary component of writing properly developed characters.
I'm sorry but if everyone is a bisexual you are limiting yourself to the type of characters that you can write, because there are certain characters that just will not be bisexual. Or if you did make the white conservative cis male orthodox christian bisexual you are damn well going to have to write a lot of complexity into that character to square the circle. You are including many conflicting ideologies in that character and explaining them or representing the character's own torment with their conflicting sexuality vs ideology becomes a necessary part of the writing.
Features of characters force you into writing directions because a character having x but also y means either a, b or c but definitely not d. If you understand what I mean.
Your world and writing depth takes a necessary hit if you do this. What you end up with is a game that is unashamedly lgbt, I'm not complaining about that because I do love me some games that are just blatantly full of gay, but it's not all I want all the time.
I feel like this is true in non interactive fiction, the problem I see is that it ends up being in Vidya games that someone always ends up with 1 or zero option, cough cough bg2. Like I agree largely with what you ate saying I just think that there are constraints on video game development under capitalism that makes the least worst solution to be everyone is basically pansexual.