Move on from what? This sounds awful: "Yes it is 100% confirmed that Henry can indeed romance a male character."
Listen, I get it in Bioware, etc. games where you create a character and decide their background, etc. and decide what kind of person the protagonist is, but Henry is very much an established character. Even giving him the option to "go gay" is fucked up in my opinion.
Oh well, I might pick it up down the line, but this is tremendously disappointing. Glad to hear it's optional and doesn't seem to pander in other respects, but I just have to ask, "why?"
Zefah if you're all about boycotting it over this just commit fully, no half-measures of 'I'll pick it up down the line' 'When it's on deep discount' or 'I'll pirate it' (If you are prepared to play it you should be prepared to pay for it).
I'm not opposed to boycotts. I'm never playing Dragon Age: Veilguard or AC Shadows for instance, because based on what has been said and seen those are irredeemable DEI trash and just don't appeal to me on any level as gameplay experiences I want to put my limited time into. However, with BG3 I almost went down the boycott route because people online were REEing about the Bear and honestly I'm glad I didn't because that game was great, despite the odd woke concession here and there. Gay Gnomes? Ok whatever, let's get back to finding a cure for these perky brain worms and working on romancing Karlach.
Do I think KCD II is going to be DEI-infested trash? No, not remotely. I've watched a lot of video commentary from innumerable people who are presently playing the game and pretty much all of them are loving it, and in love with it. The consensus is it builds on the strong foundations of KCD and improves the formula in terms of gameplay, performance, choice & consequence and overall quality of life and has some real GoTY contender vibes to it.
Do I think including an optional gay romance, and some dude from the Empire of Mali in KCD II are bad choice on the Dev's part? Devoid of full context, sure, but at the same time, I don't know how much pressure they were under to include those things from their Publishers. From what I understand the optional gay romance scene you have to go down the rabbit hole to trigger and it is pretty tame by all accounts (unlike the female romances which are more in line with KCD I). Meanwhile, the Trader from Mali ended up in Kuttenberg as part of Sigismund's foreign mercenary army and he's largely treated as an oddity by the locals by all accounts which makes absolute sense.
If someone's of the mindset that even the whiff of potential DEI = no sale, then go for it, but if it's simply a timed protest then ultimately the biggest victim isn't the developer (the games going to sell a bucketload of copies by all accounts) it's yourself for missing out on that zeitgeist period when everyone is experiencing the game firsthand and learning it together.
I operate from a 'How much is this truly going to bother me' mindset with any of these things. An option I'm never going to undertake plus a single foreign NPC in a game this vast, hardly seems worthwhile getting irate about IMHO, least of all to the extent I'm going to wholesale eschew playing as Henry once again and missing out on hanging out with Hans and getting into all sorts of Medieval chicanery in the process.
I remember a lot of people here all going mad for snapping up copies of Hogwarts Legacy as a 'Fuck you' to Game Journos and ResetEra, but all turning a blind eye to the fact that despite the 'Woke' Mob being dead set against it Portkey Games still filled that game full of DEI pleasing Woke concessions, from an absurdly multi-cultural cast for a game supposedly set in England in 1890 through to an openly trans character running the wand shop. Yet where was the boycott over that? For the record, I never bought it, but mainly because I'm just not that into Harry Potter at the end of the day.
KCD was and still is awesome. A lot of people on the left wanted that game to fail because they negatively associated Vavra with Gamergate. Famously Waypoint (RIP) refused to review it and a fair few outlets like Eurogamer and RPS wrote some pretty histrionic articles about it at the time hoping that doing so would be the kiss of death to both it and Warhorse Studios. Yet despite all of that the game went on to sell 8 million copies because for all the furore, people downright enjoyed the game, even with its steep learning curve and unforgiving mechanics.
I find it honestly astounding that I see some people now turning on Warhorse over a couple of inclusions that don't amount to a hill of beans at the end of the day against the goodwill they've earned over the years. Still, if some people want to go on a boycott Jihad about it that's their prerogative, just don't gum up the OT when it goes up for the game is all I ask.
Also if you're not pumped to the tits for KCD II based on this trailer honestly there's no helping any of you.