Why is every single companion Bi?

[Lord Tony]

Disclaimer: this isn't an anti-gay post. I am fine with gay, bi, lesbian characters like veronica.

Fallout 1 through NV all had sexual preferences.

Veronica in NV is a lesbian, she doesn't like guys.

Myron in F2 is straight, he doesn't like guys.

however every0 companion in F4 you can romance goes both ways, why is that? No one has a preference, it's weird.

[steventirey]

So the player can choose who they want, and not have to feel constrained by the developers choice. Its the same reason you can bring Strong, X6-88, or Nick onto the Prydwen with no problem, or bring Strong into Diamond City. Or why you can be a Khajiit in Skyrim and still enter the cities, and why you can join and do all the guilds at once. Bethesda likes options. (Note that Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas weren't made by Bethesda. So it isn't like they've changed how they were doing things.)

[DouglasGrave]

It does slightly weaken their sense of being a character by essentially removing sexual preference as a trait, though Fallout 4 is also the first game where it's really a significant factor (in prior games they were more like one-time events than anything lasting).

But the more you try to include, the more difficult it is to have someone for everyone, and Bethesda just decided to open the options wide. At least among those who are interested in romance at all; Ada, Codsworth, Deacon, Dogmeat, Longfellow, Nick, Strong, and X6-88 are presumably just not interested in taking things beyond a post-battle cuddle.

We're still left with five male and three female romance options, which is a few, but not all that many when you take personalities into account.

[gyaru enjoyer]

bi agenda

[Lord Tony]

Originally posted by steventirey:

So the player can choose who they want, and not have to feel constrained by the developers choice. Its the same reason you can bring Strong, X6-88, or Nick onto the Prydwen with no problem, or bring Strong into Diamond City. Or why you can be a Khajiit in Skyrim and still enter the cities, and why you can join and do all the guilds at once. Bethesda likes options. (Note that Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas weren't made by Bethesda. So it isn't like they've changed how they were doing things.)

but the entire fallout series has been about choices and consequences to those choices

also it's weird if 100% of everyone is bi

[DouglasGrave]

Originally posted by Lord Tony:

Originally posted by steventirey:

So the player can choose who they want, and not have to feel constrained by the developers choice. Its the same reason you can bring Strong, X6-88, or Nick onto the Prydwen with no problem, or bring Strong into Diamond City. Or why you can be a Khajiit in Skyrim and still enter the cities, and why you can join and do all the guilds at once. Bethesda likes options. (Note that Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas weren't made by Bethesda. So it isn't like they've changed how they were doing things.)

but the entire fallout series has been about choices and consequences to those choices

also it's weird if 100% of everyone is bi

It's not everyone, just everyone who will sleep with the player, and conveniently always works in the player's favour because it's really there to make them player-sexual. Everyone else in the game universe has their own sexual preferences as normal.

It's like Schrodinger's cat, if narrative convenience meant the cat was always alive (and feeling frisky) when you opened the box.

[Lord Tony]

Originally posted by DouglasGrave:

Originally posted by Lord Tony:

but the entire fallout series has been about choices and consequences to those choices

also it's weird if 100% of everyone is bi

It's not everyone, just everyone who will sleep with the player

That's semantics.

That's literally everyone that will have sex with you, so then everyone is bi that matters in the scenario I am talking about.

So if straight is 98% of the population why are they all 100% bi?

[DouglasGrave]

Originally posted by Lord Tony:

Originally posted by DouglasGrave:

It's not everyone, just everyone who will sleep with the player

That's semantics.

That's literally everyone that will have sex with you, so then everyone is bi that matters in the scenario I am talking about.

So if straight is 98% of the population why are they all 100% bi?

The important difference is that it's due to it being player-centric and revolves solely around them. Rather than the entire Fallout universe being bisexual it just conveniently happens that everyone the player is into is into them in a compatible way.

If you're straight, your companions are also straight. if you're gay, they're gay. If you're bi, they're bi (or at least generally compatible with your lifestyle).

Compared the Modoc marriage options from Fallout 2. The game adapted to whoever you picked.

[Incunabulum]

They're not 'bi'. They are 'player-sexual'.

Because too many of the Millennial and Zoomer crowd need to play with their little toy dolls - god forbid NPC's be written as characters rather than *objects to be used as the player sees fit*.

The people who complain loudest about 'objectification of women' also scream the loudest when their toys won't obey.

[Incunabulum]

Originally posted by DouglasGrave:

Originally posted by Lord Tony:

That's semantics.

That's literally everyone that will have sex with you, so then everyone is bi that matters in the scenario I am talking about.

So if straight is 98% of the population why are they all 100% bi?

The important difference is that it's due to it being player-centric and revolves solely around them. Rather than the entire Fallout universe being bisexual it just conveniently happens that everyone the player is into is into them in a compatible way.

If you're straight, your companions are also straight. if you're gay, they're gay. If you're bi, they're bi (or at least generally compatible with your lifestyle).

Compared the Modoc marriage options from Fallout 2. The game adapted to whoever you picked.

Nope, if you're straight your same-sex companions will still hit on you. Several times. You have to get kinda aggressive to get them to stop. You have no idea how many times Preston has jerked me away from the opening shot of combat because he wants to tell me, again, how my support and understanding saved his life.

[DouglasGrave]

Originally posted by Incunabulum:

Originally posted by DouglasGrave:

The important difference is that it's due to it being player-centric and revolves solely around them. Rather than the entire Fallout universe being bisexual it just conveniently happens that everyone the player is into is into them in a compatible way.

If you're straight, your companions are also straight. if you're gay, they're gay. If you're bi, they're bi (or at least generally compatible with your lifestyle).

Compared the Modoc marriage options from Fallout 2. The game adapted to whoever you picked.

Nope, if you're straight your same-sex companions will still hit on you. Several times. You have to get kinda aggressive to get them to stop. You have no idea how many times Preston has jerked me away from the opening shot of combat because he wants to tell me, again, how my support and understanding saved his life.

That sounds like the maximum-affinity dialogue just glitching out in general, since it should only play once (the romance option is just part of their life-defining moment).

It's kind of like how I was creeping through Concord civic access with Danse at my heels, and he kept telling me how being able to sneak up on a sleeping deathclaw was tactically advantageous. Which was weird, because you can't even do that as far as I'm aware. The deathclaw isn't even there when you can hear it breathing on the other side of a fence, and I don't remember being able to come back and find it later (after the trigger that has you fight it on the surface).

Companions repeating dialogue when they shouldn't is a broader issue, rather than something indicative of their sexual preferences or attraction to the player.

[Nitemares]

Clearly, someone doesn't wasn't around for the "whine" that was Companion Romances of Fallout New Vegas.....


I swear, if I hear one more thirsty girl swoon about Gagnon... Or another beta male whine about Vern.... I'm gonna start using harsh language....

[Nitemares]

Originally posted by DouglasGrave:

Originally posted by Incunabulum:

Nope, if you're straight your same-sex companions will still hit on you. Several times. You have to get kinda aggressive to get them to stop. You have no idea how many times Preston has jerked me away from the opening shot of combat because he wants to tell me, again, how my support and understanding saved his life.

That sounds like the maximum-affinity dialogue just glitching out in general, since it should only play once (the romance option is just part of their life-defining moment).

It's the curse of the "2" key as I call it...

"We know that 98%of players just skip the dialogue of the game they are playing to just get back to the action, so we designed our dialogue system with that in mind. All Dialogue is skippable, and with just repeated pressing the "2" <insert controller key here>"

***somewhat changed quote from Emilio, 2014 Gamescon.

There is a lead up dialogue to the romance options for all companions at a certain affinity level. If you brush off the companion at this stage, it will never come up again.

HOWEVER, the "acceptance" dialogue is... a 2 press... the same key you have been conditioned to press to "Accept" through, every. single. dialogue in the game....

So thanks to your conditioning... every male thinks you want in their pants... as does every female...

[DouglasGrave]

Originally posted by Nitemares:

Originally posted by DouglasGrave:

That sounds like the maximum-affinity dialogue just glitching out in general, since it should only play once (the romance option is just part of their life-defining moment).

It's the curse of the "2" key as I call it...

"We know that 98%of players just skip the dialogue of the game they are playing to just get back to the action, so we designed our dialogue system with that in mind. All Dialogue is skippable, and with just repeated pressing the "2" <insert controller key here>"

***somewhat changed quote from Emilio, 2014 Gamescon.

There is a lead up dialogue to the romance options for all companions at a certain affinity level. If you brush off the companion at this stage, it will never come up again.

HOWEVER, the "acceptance" dialogue is... a 2 press... the same key you have been conditioned to press to "Accept" through, every. single. dialogue in the game....

So thanks to your conditioning... every male thinks you want in their pants... as does every female...

Yeah, I know the conditioning. For me, the most annoying example is when doctors always have their barter dialogue to the left instead of down. The number of times I've had to back off from asking them to cure me when I'm perfectly fine...

[random_frugality]

Are you telling me that you guys have been able to romance a companion of the same gender as your Sole Survivor? Any time I've seen the "romance" option show up for my male SS with regard to a male companion the option has been a bright, bold red. Which I take to mean that it's something I can't do. Other times when I've taken the options that were red like that there had been some failure in whatever the thing the red caption was.

[DouglasGrave]

Originally posted by random_frugality:

Are you telling me that you guys have been able to romance a companion of the same gender as your Sole Survivor? Any time I've seen the "romance" option show up for my male SS with regard to a male companion the option has been a bright, bold red. Which I take to mean that it's something I can't do. Other times when I've taken the options that were red like that there had been some failure in whatever the thing the red caption was.

Red should just be the dialogue colour for the hardest speech check type (yellow for easy, orange for medium, red for hard). But as far as I recall, the romance options are generally orange checks.

A high Charisma helps with trying to make those random checks, but you can get any of them with any Charisma score if you're lucky enough (or prepared to reload often enough).