Gay Romance Options for Commander Shepard in Mass Effect 3

This will be an actual option in ME3, rather than hilariously awesome model switching.

Bioware producer Casey Hudson confirmed on Twitter yesterday that Mass Effect 3 will have "wider" romance options.

What this is all means can be summarized like this. There are no new romance options, meaning that every previous romance option from ME1 and ME2 continue to be options for people who will be playing ME3 for the first time in the series, or for people who want to cheat AGAIN. Previously, female Shepard had a pseudo-lesbian romance with Liara in ME1, but technically speaking the asari are mono-gendered; they only appear to be feminine to other species.

What "reactive to how you interact with them in-game" means is that Bioware is listening to fans' complaints about Dragon Age 2 where your fellow clan mates (or whatever they're called in that game) were somewhat forceful in starting relationships with you, including the team members of the same sex as your character.

There are actually very few people who actively want romance options in western RPGs, usually saying that "if I wanted to play a dating sim, I would get one where I could have interactive sex." The romance options are just the cherry on top of the sundae; they don't add anything of value and adding them doesn't negatively or positively change the game. In the first game, romance options were very simple: the two human squad members and Liara, the "mono-gendered" alien that looks, sounds, and acts exactly like a woman. The three new romance options in ME2 included all 3 new human squad members, but the other 3 were all aliens, 2 of which did not even come close to resembling humans.

There were a lot of rumors as to why gay relationships were not in the previous two games, especially after it became well-known that ME1 was going to have them, but the option was removed very late in development (Ashley and Kaidan both have lines in the audio files that directly address Shepard as she/he respectively pre and post-coitus). In ME2, the rumor was that Tali's voice actress was opposed to her character being used in a lesbian relationship, but it looks now that all that was bunk.

Then again, the option for same-sex pairings could also be limited to specific squad members, like Jack, who was openly bisexual, or Garrus, who doesn't find humans attractive, but finds Shepard attractive based on personality alone.

We'll get all the answers we want in early 2012.