The Crusader Kings series has long supported same-sex relationships in certain forms, but thanks to the way so much of the games have been built around historical ideas of marriage and succession, if players wanted gay characters to get hitched, they had to use mods.
This was explained last year by developers Paradox, after same-sex concubinages were briefly and accidentally enabled in the vanilla game, a scenario that had the potential to basically…break everything:
Paradox note that while modders had briefly enabled “same-sex concubinage” a little while ago, the developers had to quickly restrict it, “as part of fixing a concubine-related bug, believing it’d never been possible at all.”
“Since then, we’ve made changes to properly support same-sex concubinage, and it will come alongside other modding improvements,” as part of the game’s series of 1.3 updates. “Further, we plan to support same-sex marriage for mods in 1.4,” Paradox add. “Due to larger technical risks surrounding it, it was not feasible to include that in 1.3.X; we need more time to test it to ensure that this support does not introduce bugs in the vanilla game.”
That was April 2021, and while Paradox originally promised same-sex marriage was coming in the 1.4 update, it’s now coming as part of the 1.5 update, alongside the Royal Court DLC, the first major expansion for the 2020 release.
Players will be able to toggle the ability to have same-sex marriages from the main menu before starting a game, and Paradox says they’ve “updated a variety of AI logic and interactions and content to take that into account when playing.”
“This is something that we’re very happy to be able to put into the game and have support in the game rules for unmodded games too, it is something that a lot of the team and community wanted and we are glad it is finally going to be shipped in 1.5.”
The Royal Court DLC is due to hit on February 8, and this update will be released alongside it. And in other CK3 news, the game is somehow coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X|S on March 29.
Courtesy: Kotaku