14 DAY TRIAL // The original Mass Effect had to put up with some serious accusations as some of its "heavy romance" scenes faced powerful controversies and were attacked head-on by Fox News, a company that went overboard with its criticism and ended up depicting a very distorted reality. In fact, BioWare's Mass Effect was completely void of the explicit sex scenes and full-frontal nudity Fox News accused it of, but that didn't change some of the reputation the game got, a reputation that seems to have stretched some of its long arms all the way to the title's sequel, Mass Effect 2.
While ME2 still features romantic scenes and offers the possibility of perusing a personal relationship with your team members, the level of visual details has been toned down, with a lot more fade to black and the camera panning away from the characters, leaving our imagination to do the rest. And while some believed that this was because the company feared its past experience with such matters, BioWare shot down this idea without any signs of pity or remorse.
Answering to a forum question about the less graphical nature of the love scenes in Mass Effect 2, BioWare's Stanley Woo responded that, "It's kinda funny that this topic keeps coming up over and over again. People who claim to be old enough and mature enough to handle sex and nudity in a game seem to believe that any lack of sex and nudity in the game is a sign of self-censorship. They generally don't believe that a game can be called 'mature' without explicit sex and/or nudity."
And he's perfectly right, if you consider how many violent and gory, mature games never even have the time for a kiss on the cheek, never mind any kind of physical relationship between characters. "Let me tell you, folks, that as a developer full of mature individuals, we are also free to not have explicit sex and/or nudity in our games, no matter what you, Fox News, the government, or Bunky the Wonder Clown has to say about it," Woo added. "We have never considered it a 'problem,' it is simply a choice we have made and we have every right to make that choice."