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Star Wars: The Old Republic’s divisive gay planet

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Dancing, Sir. Mostly Dancing.

The Old Republic, EA and Bioware’s now free-to-play space-bound MMO will, like other Bioware games, soon be adding the option for same sex romances, but here’s the kicker; homosexual shenanigans will be confined to a single planet, Makreb – and now nobody’s happy.

“As we have said in the past, allowing same gender romance is something we are very supportive of,” wrote BioWare’s Jeff Hickman,in a blog post revealing that the option will come with the game’s new expansion pack “Rise of the Hutt Cartel.” Apparently, the expansion will include characters with who spurt out canned, flirtatious dialog for same-sex players.

One problem is that  the expansion only open to high-level players who’re willing to open their wallets, so those of the LBGT persuasion have to pay to be gay. The biggest problem is that confining it to just one planet within an entire universe just smacks of segregation; like an interstellar, afterthought gay bar. Or, y’know…a leper colony.

But hey, at least Bioware is trying, right? They says it’s a stop-gap measure, and that they will be pursuing more Same Gender Romance in the future.

First of all, I want to apologize that this is taking so long to get in the game. I realize that we promised SGR to you guys and that many of you believed that this would be with a companion character. Unfortunately, this will take a lot more work than we realized at the time and it (like some other pieces of content we talked about earlier in the year) has been delayed as we focused on the changes required to take the game Free-to-Play.

So it’s a bit of a compromise at the moment, but one that’s left the more homophobic players unhappy with this particular sort of rebel alliance.

“Star Wars is a family based story with nothing to do with SGR,” says one forum poster unhappy about the big ol’ gay planet. “Please, please, please Bioware, Lucasarts, and EA do not allow SGR in Star Wars The Old Republic. It will ruin the game and make a lot of people leave it.”

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Still, I think it’s ridiculous that in 2013, labels like “Gay People,” “Lesbian People” and “Bisexual People” are still used, instead of the more encompassing and simpler “People.”

Last Updated: January 15, 2013

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