New Videogame Features Gay Sex Scene
"Gaymers" who recently purchased the latest installment of the action role-playing videogame "Mass Effect" may be pleasantly surprised that they have the option of making the lead character gay.
In "Mass Effect 3" players can make Commander Shepard gay, straight or have no sexual preference at all, Forbes reported. But if a player does decide that Shepard should be "born this way," then they will encounter a steamy sex scene, which leaked on the Internet before the game's release.
Shepard's love interest is a blue-eye black man named Cortez who recently lost his husband in a war. You have the option to empathize with him, which may lead to sleeping with him -- the choice is all up to the player, Forbes notes.
The scene (which is slightly over a minute and a half) has caused a bit of controversy, which may be no surprise to some as the videogame world has a reputation of homophobia and rarely depicts gays in games. Although some videogame websites have applauded BioWare, the game's developer, for including a gay storyline, some fans have expressed a negative response towards the scene.
The YouTube clip, which is posted on ComputerandVideogames.com's channel, currently has over 107,000 views with 1,820 "likes" and "2,416" dislikes.
"More liberals trying to push there agendas on you while at the same time crying there eyes out when some one mentions the word god," one YouTube user commented.
"The negative responses are from sad immature boys who spend the majority of their time in rooms lit by nothing but the television or computer screen. Most of them probably lack the social skills to go to the corner store without feeling horribly uncomforatable," another wrote. "They play FPS games 24/7 in order to try to feel more important and manly and then seek to bash entire groups online in an effort to affirm their masculinity, gaming and gay bashing are the only ways in which they can."
Although "Mass Effect 3" may be the first videogame to feature a gay lead, it isn't the first to have a gay sex scene. "Dragon Age: Origins" has a moment where a male human and a male-elf hookup.
Mass Effect 3's producer Casey Hudson spoke to "Up at Noon" -- a weekly videogame news show on YouTube -- about the gay romance in "Mass Effect," Imagine Games Network reported.
"We got a lot of feedback about romances, and the way people perceive our game," Hudson said. "It's kind of interesting, because as we've layered in things, you can make a lot of choices about relationships. At some point over the course of the series we realized that people felt that same-sex relationships were a conspicuous absence from the options you have as a player. And we always strive to be inclusive. So we included that."
"When we started the series, we actually had no idea whether our characters would be as compelling in terms of human emotion as we wanted them to be -- especially with alien characters," he added. "So we didn't design romances for some of the aliens like Garrus and Tali. But the voice acting turned out to be really good, and even though they were alien they kind of had a really deep ability to convey human emotion. And people wanted romances with them. And so we did that as well, and they become some of our more popular relationships."
Watch the sexy clip below (beware it may contain spoilers):