[mabbo]

It seems odd to me. Paradox is a Swedish company, and Sweden is a fairly liberal country. Same-sex marriage was legalized in 2009, and even the Church of Sweden gave the go-ahead on performing same-sex marriages the same year.

The game logic around this is simple enough that changing two byes fixes it, so it's not a technical issue.

What gives?

[josefx]

Take a look at the screenshot of that same sex marriage, do you notice something odd? The gender symbols at the bottom are male/female not male/male. The patch only disables the gender check, it does not fix the game content or any other logic related to marriage. There are probably dozens of follow up bugs waiting, some of which will need new game logic and art to fix.

[jandrese]

I have to wonder if one of the men will become pregnant and have a child once they are married.

[lostgame]

You could use the excuse that they are transgender...but again, that probably only adds another layer of complication and abstraction, heh...

[tom_mellior]

> The gender symbols at the bottom are male/female not male/male.

Do you mean the symbols next to "This is you"? I think you're misinterpreting them. That's the character's sexual orientation. It's always there, regardless of the character's marriage status. And gay or lesbian characters can and do marry people of the other sex even if that would not be what they want. The sexual orientation symbol doesn't change.

[josefx]

I don't own the game so I was confused by having both the character and their spouse in the image. Sorry about that.

[phire]

That is a good reason for why they haven't implemented the feature themselves.

But it's not a good reason for why they are blocking all discussion about a mod that implements the feature in a buggy way.

[scott_w]

Others have mentioned in the comments: the blocking is because they don’t want people poking round the binary. It’s likely because of the opportunity for creating and spreading malware via the forum.

[flatiron]

I just can’t fathom they couldn’t see this coming.

[meibo]

That just means someone in charge made a bad choice during planning and either no dev or designer ever dared to speak up against it or many of them supported said bad choice.

[Causality1]

Why is it a bad choice? A game set in middle age Europe has no more reason to foresee needing the ability to mod gay marriage into it than accommodating modding cell phones into it. It's not an insignificant amount for work just to include an anachronism.

[Blikkentrekker]

It seems odd to that when the scripting language allows such absurd customization to hardcode the sexes of marriage, to be fair.

Apparently one can marry a piece of furniture with the scripting language, so long as the sex be appropriate.

[meibo]

Have you played this game and seen how much you can customize it?

What's an anachronism in a sea of many others, if you wish to have them in your personal save games. And if you don't, you stick to whatever is historically accurate.

Not having the foresight to be aware of this matter and the issues that come with it(going as far to be be especially exclusive) as a game studio in 2020 is what they should think about the next time they set out to make a game like this.

[Causality1]

Given a preference I'd rather keep "but it's current year" out of the considerations of the devs of games I play. It's not a role playing game. It's not Tomodachi Life. They owe us nothing except what they advertise.

[xanth]

And the game engine is from 2007 which likely built in many of these historically accurate constraints to reduce scope. Remember until recently this much more core functionality was broken; "Fixed looting not making you hostile to looted country if you’re a vassal"

https://ck3.paradoxwikis.com/Patch_1.3.X#1.3.1

[meibo]

Yes, it was started in 2007 - maybe some people here still live in the early 2000s, but that's 14 years and 2 big iterations ago. Check the calendar.

Maybe games just shouldn't be rushed out this much either.

[beaconstudios]

it's 2021 actually.

[ponow]

"Just" made a bad choice? It's clearly an historically accurate, and _simplifying_ assumption, which you dismiss. The fact that they include a scripting language needn't obligate them to broaden the scope of their project. It's theirs, and they needn't pretend to cater to anyone they don't wish to, especially if it isn't a priority. They can make whatever they want, as can you.

[retrac]

I suspect it has approximately nothing to do with what the patch implemented. And a lot more to do with it being effectively a guide to reverse-engineering the game executable. Paradox makes multiplayer games. They probably saw this as How To Cheat 101.

As to not wanting to do the work to make it implementable without a binary patch, well, it's just not in the game. I can imagine hesitance to start modifying the game based on demands of modders for multiple reasons, even if they liked the mod itself.

[geofft]

It sounds like the thing that was posted on the forums was the binary patch itself, and this article's explanation of how to reverse engineer the game was written after the poster was banned.

[pseudalopex]

They host How to Cheat 101.[1]

[1] https://ck3.paradoxwikis.com/Console_commands

[Google234]

You can’t use those in multiplayer... unless you reverse engineer the game and patch the cheat checks oout...

[sudosysgen]

Crusader Kings III has you live on as your daughter/son when you die.

As there is no adoption mechanic, same-sex relationships will lead to a game over unless you are one of the few countries that can use the House Seniority mechanic.

So I guess they never got around to implementing adoption.

Banning though...? That was weird.

[maxander]

> So I guess they never got around to implementing adoption.

If you think about this, it seems pretty obvious the reason they didn’t include adoption was that it’s overpowered. The CK series is all about managing dynasties, so the randomness of reproduction is a major game mechanic, one of the primary sources of problems and challenges. Adoption would totally negate all of that.

Like, if Henry VIII could just have adopted a son, his whole story would have been so much more straightforward! :)

(None of which really justifies the Paradox response, of course, since adoption isn’t necessary for having same-sex marriages (even player ones) and not losing.)

[busterarm]

It's the same reason as adoption.

You have the ability to arrange marriages as King or Queen. Just as if you could adopt, you could dilute the power of your enemies by arranging same-sex marriages that can have no legal heir.

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

They could make adoption produce a weaker claim to the title, with greater risk of usurpers leading a rebellion. I think this mechanic could be balanced and would add realism (it happened in history).

[amyjess]

It's also something that could be restricted by culture. In some cultures, adopting your heir is a normal, everyday thing, but in others, blood is all that matters.

[bellyfullofbac]

To be generous, I would presume the banning was because he uploaded a "hack" that changes the binary of the game, and that's not allowed. There's probably a clause in the ToS that says no reverse engineering is allowed.

But I look forward to the woke brigade assuming the devs hate the LGBT community, and showing up with virtual pitchforks... /s (Disclaimer: I support the struggles of the LGBT community, but I do have a problem with stupid extremist unthinking zealots, and there seems to be plenty of them everywhere.)

[Tomte]

> Crusader Kings III has you live on as your daughter/son when you die.

No, you play on as your heir, which may be your uncle or some distant relative. This may even be your liege.

[scott_w]

Only if they’re of the same house, otherwise your dynasty ends and it’s game over.

[amyjess]

Wait, is this something they changed between II and III? Because in II, if you die with no children, but you have a brother, your brother inherits, even if you don't have Seniority. You only Game Over if your heir doesn't have your last name.

(also, there is the possibility your character will cheat, sire a bastard, and then have the bastard legitimized)

[flukus]

It wouldn't be the first time in game or in real life where a homosexual ruler has performed their royal duties and conceived an heir, then there are options to legitimize bastards.

[p1necone]

Presumably slavish dedication to historical accuracy. Although were there really no cultures in that era that allowed same sex marriage?

I personally wouldn't want a seemingly historically accurate (ish) game to present the churches of the age as being okay with same sex marriage when they weren't. Although being able to toggle it on in the settings would be cool.

[chaorace]

CKIII has several "fun" toggles for ahistoric behavior, so I'm not sure if this argument fits. For example: you can flip the default inheritence system to favor women or even make the majority of people homosexual.

I'm guessing it's just more or less something they didn't get around to implementing. Perhaps they wanted to tackle it in a future patch or DLC (I can see this happening if turning this on somehow led to buggy behavior in other areas)

[p1necone]

Yeah that's exactly what I'd want for marriage. I'm definitely more inclined to think this is just one of many features they didn't get around to adding rather than an intentional omission.

[omegaworks]

It's expressing a constraint that wasn't entirely set until the end of the period of time the game is set in, as the power of the nobility and church consolidate. It would be more interesting if it allowed you to play with some of the tensions between the church and the nobility. Want to marry your same-sex spouse? Throw your weight around a la King Henry VIII and establish your own church.

https://theconversation.com/a-thousand-years-ago-the-catholi...

[Blikkentrekker]

To translate the concept of “marriage” between cultures is a fool's errand. — historical, and current cultures often had a variety of different concepts one could all call “marriage”.

It is as though one attempt to translate the ranks of entirely different historical military structures.

Though, such is also often done, such as the “Kings” of Rome which were elected and had a co-ruler.

In any case, one might for instance argue that a male Japanese samurai in 1800 could be “bound” to both a male and a female at the same time, but only one of each, but only the latter union is traditionally translated as “marriage” for “reasons” even though the former comes no less close. In act, the former union was typically more so one of love, and the latter more so one of business.

[krapp]

>Although were there really no cultures in that era that allowed same sex marriage?

No Christian cultures, obviously.

[kergonath]

Was there any historical culture in which same-sex marriage was common or accepted? I can’t think of one, Christian or otherwise (though I can think of a couple of examples of same-sex people got married by subterfuge).

[michaelpb]

Yep, many! Today's era is quit unusual in how few open gay and bisexual relationships are had by public officials (which are the unions that are typically best recorded). In many other historical periods across different regions, today's standards would be considered unusually heterosexual. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_same-sex_unions

[xanth]

Given that the game simulates 867 to 1453 it was much more of a rarity, don't get me wrong I'd love to have the feature but I'm glad they shipped core features of the historical simulation game and more than likely left it on the backlog.

[michaelpb]

Gay marriage was more common than you might think during that time period as well, even in Europe! I found a few interesting accounts, from this summary of an older book on the topic: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/when-marriage-between-gay...

[notsureaboutpg]

No there were not. The other reply confuses acceptance of homosexual activity with acceptance of homosexual marriage. The latter is a new concept, the former was common in many cultures (notably Ancient Rome / Greece).

Homosexual activity cannot result in biological children so there was really never any society that considered anything like homosexual marriage until our own. The main reason for marriage was to control sexual unions and the children who might result from them. In societies which had marriage (many had no such concept) homosexual marriage didn't make much sense.

The wikipedia article on historical same-sex unions mentions that some cultures had rituals around cementing homosexual relationships but those wouldn't be considered the same as marriage, they'd be more like any pre-sexual / pre-relationship rituals. Marriage typically is about the sharing of finances, responsibilities, the raising and rights of children, etc. And none of the examples in the wikipedia article on historical same-sex unions concerned any of these.

[staticassertion]

Not to delve, but the article does mention a number of relationships that are explicitly comparable (according to the article) to heterosexual marriage, or are otherwise described as unions. There are multiple references to homosexual marriage and union.

I'm not sure that the points you're making about shared finances are particularly important, or even true, based on this. But I'm not a historian.

[notsureaboutpg]

The article is being too generous to these accounts. Here is an example: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cassius_D...

In this account of the relationship between two men they are termed in quotes as "husband" and "wife" to imply sarcasm . They were not literally considered with seriousness to be married by their society the way we consider men to be able to do to each other now.

Marriage, in societies where it existed often served two functions: binding families and providing for the legal rights of children. Unions of lovers did not do either of these.

Many ritualized unions of a same-sex variety in history were of the latter type and those of the former would not likely have been seriously recognized by the outward society. There isn't a strong record of that anyways.

[ekianjo]

Did Buddhist cultures allow same sex marriages in ancient times?

[goatinaboat]

No Christian cultures, obviously.

Interestingly, the vast majority of countries that now permit gay marriage have Christian histories.

[Guthur]

Balancing this in a dynasty simulator would be an absolute nightmare.

Presumably the AI would have the ability as well, and then you would have to start coding some restrictions to avoid a dynasty simulator spanning 100s of years going off the rails and then you'll be in for all sorts of progressive political wrangling.

Frankly if it was me I'd have stayed well away from it as well.

Also, Paradox have not a great track record of balancing things or maintaining quality straight out of the gate with their games anyway. I do love their games though.

[Guthur]

I know I shouldn't talk about down votes but I love how it proves my point. It is impossible to have rational discussions about these topics and so it's actually optimal to avoid them entirely.

And as an aside the game had homosexuality and so assuming there was some conservative stance on the part of the game developer appears ill founded.

[jeffchien]

Their official stance [1] is:

> You can make same-sex relations acceptable, but marriage will still only be opposite due to historical constraints.

Other than their official stance, I wonder if it's because they'd need to script in the in-game church's (presumably negative) reaction to this. Also there doesn't seem to be adoption in the base game, so maybe they didn't want to hand the player a quick path to a game over?

[1] https://ck3.paradoxwikis.com/index.php?title=FAQ

[bregma]

The game simulates historic reality, and that reality was that marriage between nobles was mostly political and about consolidating land and power rather than about sex, love, or attraction although breeding was also intrinsic to marriage for the same reason. Marriage is a major game mechanic with much of the UI and playflow dedicated to finding the right spouse based on a wide range of conditions (family status, demesne extent, breeding traits). Doing same-sex marriage would require a massive overhaul to much of the game mechanic, not just a simple gender swap for the intended spouse.

Because the love/sex/reproduction angle was separate from the marriage angle, the game already has very deep support for all variants of human relationship when it comes to lovers, concubines, and uh, other special situations and it's very historically accurate. Homosexuality among nobles was not uncommon in the middle ages and the game supports this directly, but marriage had nothing to do with love or sex.

I went to Glitterhoof's chambers and gave him a good tumble. It is good to be the king.

[p1necone]

If it were me I'd just let same sex couples impregnate each other, regardless of sex. Sounds like a hoot.

[ttt0]

I'd also add furries and dragonkins while we're at it, because why not, it might as well be a fantasy game

[Rebelgecko]

CK2 let put a horse named Glitterhoof on your council and then have sex with it, so that would be par for the course.

[COGlory]

Was it ever clear if Glitterhoof was real, or a hallucination?

[Semaphor]

Here is the story: https://imgur.com/a/K1utf

Note that this was unintentional ;)

[ttt0]

A reference to Caligula?

[wtallis]

I recall a Game of Thrones mod for CK2 that seemed like a very appropriate combination.

[paxys]

That's their official stance for the game itself, not the modding tools. I can assure you same sex marriage is probably the least historically inaccurate thing that would be modded in. Heck you can make yourself a kingdom of homosexuals.

[inshadows]

Then it must be a political issue, right?

Or maybe it's just a simulator of dark ages where same-sex marriage just wasn't. Go ahead, point out my wrong usage of "dark ages".

[vmception]

Or they just didn't program that and had too little representation in their company to notice and weigh that against marketability in various markets.

[dudul]

Or they did notice, figured out it would be complex to modify the engine to handle this case, found data indicating that having this feature or not would have zero impact of the marketability/sales of the game, and just decided to use the bandwidth on something more valuable.

[sudosysgen]

Have we read the same post? It's a one-byte modification, and they ban for mentioning the patch.

[PeterisP]

It's a one-byte modification if you want just to remove the check for mixed genders upon marriage. If you want to implement as proper game feature - as a selectable option - then you need to do a bunch more things; you need to model the conditions in which that same-sex marriage would be permitted (even if it'd be enabled in the game as such, there would be character-faith-related conditions), you need to model how every other character would treat that marriage (a bunch of conditional modifiers depending on the attributes of that other character), you need to decide how it interacts with polygamy if someone has spouses of both genders; you need to adjust for any impacts on the many inheritance models (after all, the main gameplay purpose of marriage as opposed to just lovers is the effect on inheritance); you need to adjust any events and event text (and translations) where it does not make sense any more; you'd likely need to change the treatment of bastards if one is born in a woman-woman marriage and you need to treat edge cases such as regency if both spouses are pregnant (from other partners) at the same time; etc, etc.

It's far more than a one-byte modification.

[sudosysgen]

CK3 has a lot of modifiers - you can simply have this as one of them.

You don't need to do any of the above, everything else you mentioned is something that can be done in the scripting language. The community will do it for you. You just have to hide a toggle somewhere.

[inshadows]

Maybe adding same-sex marriage just isn't important for game from times where same-sex marriage was non-existent. I want rocket jumps in every game but I doubt my desire will be fulfilled.

[dudul]

The author acknowledges themselves: "The patch that I made was only good for the current Steam version of CK3, on my operating system, with my cpu architecture."

Not counting the fact that a change like that would need to be more thoroughly QA-ed to make sure it doesn't break something at some point.

[sudosysgen]

This is because targets have different binaries. The change in the code is removing one if statement.

[COGlory]

That will introduce game breaking behavior when you can't have kids...

[sudosysgen]

Yes, of course. That's the cost of same-sex marriage in such a game, unless you use the House Seniority mechanic you will eventually have a game over. That doesn't make this anymore difficult than switching a false to a true in an optional fun feature, it'll just be very difficult to play the game (but not impossible!)

[bregma]

Elective succession and tanistry were rather common historically and an option in the game, so having kids shouldn't be significant. The key is the heir has to be in your dynasty, not that it be the fruit of your loins.

[PeterisP]

Well, one can have kids from other partners, not only within marriage.

[crooked-v]

My personal guess would be that there's some kind of non-deterministic game-state-exploding bug tangled up with the marriage checks, and that the amount of work to fix it puts it at the bottom of the list after new feature work. This would be entirely consistent with the sorts of weird bugs that have already come up in CK3 change logs.

[baud147258]

Maybe Paradox don't want to host mods that are a modified version of the core executable binaries

[bstar77]

You also cannot disable homosexuality so I don't think their decisions are politically aligned.

[opk]

Richard I of England and Philip II of France were very likely homosexual but still got married off in the hopes of creating an heir. Maybe a suitably bribed pope in the middle ages would have found a way to get a gay marriage passed. That it'd even be considered necessary is doubtful - that "at night their beds did not separate them" was likely good enough for that pair of K̶i̶n̶g̶s̶/Queens. So they could be well-aligned with the relevant historical period and setting.

I have zero familiarity with the game so am purely considering the title here.

[dudul]

> it turns out that the game logic to marry two characters is contained in the game binary, not in the scripting files, and the game engine will unilaterally block same sex marriages.

> it became clear from statements both on the forums and off of it that while the concern was noted, fixing the issue would be difficult, and it wasn’t a current priority.

Doesn't look like it's that easy.

[Forge36]

Inheritance and adoption was probably cut from the feature set for simplicity. Without an heir you "lose"and I suspect adoption to force an heir would break some lose scenarios

[noicebrewery]

No guarantees about the personal beliefs of the person/people running the forums, who seems to be the major blocker of this patch / discussing the patch.

[psychtrauma]

Occam's razor suggests to me that some people in the design process defined marriage as being strictly between a man and a woman, and nobody else cared enough to change this.

It doesn't fill me with joy that a 2020 game would make that choice.

Also the choice to have characters default to open homophobia, and for that to be used as a positive in promotional material, is not an indicator of a gay-friendly organisation.

[kergonath]

> Occam's razor suggests to me that some people in the design process defined marriage as being strictly between a man and a woman, and nobody else cared enough to change this.

Occam’s razor suggests they built a historical game and just ended up embedding some in-game cultural background in the game engine. As others pointed out, dealing with same-sex marriages affects several aspects of the game, particularly dynastic rules.

> It doesn't fill me with joy that a 2020 game would make that choice.

You are working from your assumption, here. We really have no idea how it ended up that way.

> Also the choice to have characters default to open homophobia, and for that to be used as a positive in promotional material, is not an indicator of a gay-friendly organisation.

I find it interesting that you genuinely feel that. If anything, it tells a lot about how pervasive violence is in our societies. The game is full of back-stabbing, lies, cheating, poisonings, forced marriages, the occasional war, and yes, hate and irrational beliefs. Not much of it is moral, and yet you’re not pained that the developers might be enthusiastic about smothering babies.

It is a game set up in Europe in the Middle Ages. Hardly the most progressive environment. If you want to build a tolerant utopia, Cities Skylines is probably a better game. It is also great, but you might also like the occasional opportunity to be a ruthless, amoral, power hungry arsehole every now and then, regardless of your personal situation IRL.

[psychtrauma]

> It doesn't fill me with joy that a 2020 game would make that choice.

> You are working from your assumption, here.

I can rephrase: "It doesn't fill me with joy that any game company in 2020, particularly one known for encouraging modding, would hard-code marriage as between a man and a woman"

[brailsafe]

But don't forget about Hanlon's razor.

I don't play Crusader Kings, was more curious about the technical bit, but it would be a shame to not be able to release what seems like a quazi-historical game with fairly different cultural norms by default.

[psychtrauma]

Hanlon's razor: "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

What's the difference? The outcome is the same.