You’ll be able to make your Assassin’s Creed Odyssey homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual or even asexual, Ubisoft has confirmed with Stevivor.

The sky is really the limit when it comes to the game’s new romancing system, Narrative Director Melissa MacCoubrey told us.

“If you want to be a woman and romance a woman, you can do that. If you want to be a man and romance a woman, you can do that. If you want to be a man and romance a man and a woman, you can do that,” she affirmed.

For MacCoubrey, the choice to romance the people you want as the in-game gender you identify with was integral to the system.

“You know, we’re making a game that offers choice, and this is something that matters a lot to people,” she said as I took note of her beautifully rainbow-coloured hair.

“It matters a lot to me. And it matters a lot to the team.”

Because of that, it was incredibly important for MacCoubrey and Ubisoft Quebec to do it right.

“I was really hesitant to touch on romance,” MacCoubrey admitted. “Because romance is always kind of been a part of the Assassin’s story at some point or another. You know, there’s a really heavy emphasis on the early games that you have to find a romantic partner so you could carry on [your lineage]. And so I was really hesitant because like when we were talking the story, I really wanted our team to tell a story that was really personal and very close to family.

“So when we approached looking at romance, it very much became a part of the world experience. And you know, I’ve talked to you before about creating a relationship with characters through the interactive dialogue system. It provided us with an opportunity to get to know characters better and to a deeper degree. And so out of that, we had really big discussions. You know, I talked to Scott [Phillips, Game Director] a lot about it. And one of my assistants on the team was like ‘alright, now how are we going to do romance. We got to put it in. How are we going to do it?’

“It very much evolved as part of the world you’re exploring. So we didn’t make it part of the hero’s journey experience. Like the beats are going to hit trying to find your family across Greece, but we knew it was a huge part of life. And we know that players love to explore different characters and get to know people at different levels. And so for us, that was really important that you’d be able to explore the world, that there would be people in that world that could give that relationship.”

As part of the experience of living your own personal odyssey, you can choose to role-play as an asexual character, MacCoubrey pointed out.

“We’re not forcing you to do something you don’t want to do,” she said. “So if you’re somebody who’s asexual, you don’t have to engage in something like this. It’s not forced. It’s very much your choice. If you’re playing Alexios and you want to romance Soleus, go for it. You do you, man. It was always important for me and my team to make sure that options were available for whoever wanted to pursue it.”

MacCoubrey hopes the new system will excite players as much as it has her own team.

“It’s new for us!” MacCoubrey exclaimed. “We were never sure how far we were going to push it or how much we were going to go into it. And then the more we kind of built out some of these characters to be romance figures, we just were like, ‘oh this is exciting! We can explore a more of this going forward!”

Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey heads to Windows PC, Xbox One and PS4 on 5 October, Ubisoft today announced. We’ve a post detailing all we know of the game here.

Steve Wright traveled to Los Angeles to cover Odyssey as a guest of Ubisoft. The arrangement does not impact our Ubisoft coverage, nor limit additional E3 2018 coverage.