For those who have not been following along there has been some negative publicity when it comes to The Old Republic on the topic of homosexuality/lesbianism. The big one being when they started banning people from the forums who talked about being gay/lesbian in their personal lives as the words were considered "bad" and broke the forum rules, this has since been rectified, but the other big topic in question has always been about whether or not you would be allowed to have said relationships in game.
While Bioware has had a long history of having gay and lesbian options in all their games, Star Wars on the other hand has had an even longer history of never allowing gay/lesbian characters in their universe. To the best of my knowledge the only time an openly gay character has been allowed in an official Star Wars sanctioned product was the character Juhanni in Knights of the Old Republic who would accept advances from the player if they were also a female character; coincidentally a Bioware game. There have been several forums on the official site asking about this, and up until now the answer has been a big resounding silence from the developers.
However, yesterday they finally came out of the closet and ended their silence on the topic with the below official statement saying that they would be including the option for players to romance people of the same sex in an update post launch.
The official statement posted on the SWTOR Forums discussing the topics:
Due to the design constraints of a fully voiced MMO of this scale and size, many choices had to be made as to the launch and post-launch feature set. Same gender romances with companion characters in Star Wars: The Old Republic will be a post-launch feature. Because The Old Republic is an MMO, the game will live on through content expansions which allow us to include content and features that could not be included at launch, including the addition of more companion characters who will have additional romance options.
Whenever they do finally add it to the game, it should be some interesting reading in the patch notes. Sadly, there has still been zero word on Wookie romance options.
