A member of the Mass Effect 2 development team confirms that Bioware decided to change Jack’s sexual condition after the Fox News controversy.
When everyone is already waiting for the remastering of the Mass Effect trilogy to officially announce its release date while we settle for rumors, we are without a doubt one of the most beloved RPG sagas ever. Its complex lore, its narrative guided through the player’s decisions, and its characters complete a very deep franchise that even made headlines at the time on Fox News, the conservative American television channel. In fact, due to a debate in which the franchise was the protagonist, Bioware decided to change some aspects of the romances for Mass Effect 2.
According to an interview in The Gamer with Brian Kindregan, one of the writers of Mass Effect 2, a debate about sex in Mass Effect changed the way the studio forged relationships between characters in this second installment. As we can see in the attached video, Geoff Keighley, at the time he was still a producer of Spike TV, participated in this debate, along with Cooper Lawrence, a psychologist, obviously also conservative, who considered the way in which the IP of Bioware was about sex.
Changes in Jack’s character
For anyone who has witnessed any sex scene in Mass Effect it is clear that it is something really soft and not at all explicit, but for many uninformed viewers these could be disturbing, something that Bioware took into account when withdrawing a homosexual relationship completely .
Thus, according to Kindregan, Jack was going to be a pansexual character capable of maintaining a relationship with him or the protagonist, regardless of their gender. However, the option of having a relationship with a female protagonist was eliminated as ne Bioware considered that the game would be observed with a magnifying glass after the controversy of the first game.
“Mass Effect has always been unfairly criticized in the United States by Fox News, at a time when there were more people in the world who thought there was a connection between reality and what was debated on Fox News,” he says Kindregan. “The Mass Effect development team was very progressive, very open minded, but I think there was concern since in the first game there was only a homosexual relationship, and in theory it was not a gay relationship, since Liara belonged to a race single gender “. I think if that had been controversial, you had to be careful with Mass Effect 2. “
Meanwhile, Jack’s voice actress, Courtenay Taylor, confirmed this characteristic of her character. “It’s fun for me, because my knowledge was always that she was pansexual,” recalling that modders were able to change that to include more romance options for her character.
Mass Effect 2 originally launched in 2010, and will be included in the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which is set to arrive this coming spring.
