As we have previously reported, same-sex romances in Mass Effect 2 were seemingly planned at one stage in development, but were cut before launch. According to voice actor Courtenay Taylor, Jack was written to be pansexual, and this was later supported by audio files found by modders.
Yet what modders found went further than this - it revealed that most of the crew had at least some trace of a same-sex romance left in the game. Upon making this discovery, the modding community quickly got to work piecing it all together and getting this cut content functioning again. Now, just a few weeks later, the first part of this restoration is available to the public.
The More Gay Romances mod is just that - a mod that makes Jack and Miranda’s romantic subplots available to all Shepards, regardless of gender. This first release only pertains to Mass Effect 2, but a release for the third game is on the way.
“While there is a fair amount of cut content in the game files for these romances, there is also quite a bit of dialogue that was left unvoiced. To address this problem, this mod re-purposes dialogue from other areas of the game to fill in for any unvoiced dialogue”, explains the mod’s project lead, Mentlegen. Indeed, it isn’t as simple as just re-adding what was cut, as a lot of the scenes still need to be finished.
Jack and Miranda aren’t the only characters with cut same-sex romance content. Kaidan, Ashley, Jacob, Thane, and Tali all have files suggesting they were originally intended to be queer, and that this may have been cut to avoid the controversy of the first game. Mods to restore these lost romances are on the way.
Despite its immense popularity, Mass Effect 2 certainly sticks out for its lack of LGBTQ+ representation. Despite the first game having a full queer romance with Liara, there’s no way to get the Paramour achievement in the sequel unless you shack up with a character of the opposite sex. This seemed like a strange step back, which was later rectified in Mass Effect 3.