I highly doubt they'll change much in the remaster given that they're billing it as just a remaster, not a remake--that makes me think it'll be largely the exact same games, but with cleaned up graphics and back-end tech stuff. I think expecting anything more is just going to set us up for disappointment.
As for them removing Jack's romance with femShep, it sucks and it's homophobic/biphobic, but we have to remember that they're also tied to what the investors and execs want. You can't just go rogue and somehow leave it in the game (or, more accurately, finish it) as a single dev (or even just a few); that takes time and resources that you have to spend elsewhere as part of the team. Leaving it in could have risked the entire game and the team's positions, and with the firestorm that was Hot Coffee despite it not even being accessible without hacking, something like this at that time could have really fucked over the entire project.
That doesn't mean it was the right choice or a good choice, not at all, but when you're faced with potential legal consequences... I mean, look at the history there. When the first game came out, Jack Thompson was actively still attempting to ban video games and stir up moral outrage, Fox News had picked it all up, Don't Ask Don't Tell was still in effect, marriage equality hadn't been legalized (and the majority of people, by a slim margin, still opposed it), and the amount of people that thought same-sex relationships should be legal actually went
down a few percent the next year, according to Gallup polls. The game was already under fire for including sex scenes at all, and Hot Coffee had just happened a couple of years before.
Releasing the first game and working on the second in that atmosphere, I understand it, especially because Bioware was a big company beholden to shareholders and investors. Look at film history, for example: homosexuality itself was outlawed depicted in film until the late 1960s, and gay characters essentially had to be punished or portrayed as villains, hence why we got queer-coded characters so often. That doesn't mean that the people who didn't put out positive gay characters were cowardly or homophobic: they did what they could at the time.
It's absolutely a disservice to Jack and to us queer people, and I think it was the wrong decision--a cowardly one, even--but characterizing it as enacting the agenda of homophobes seems a little uncharitable given the circumstances. It's a complex situation that isn't as simple as "you furthered the agenda of people who want to eradicate us," you know? It's easy enough to say and even believe that in a time where we have more queer representation than ever (and still not enough! it's still a battle!), but the context is important.
Those aren't the alternatives; no one in game development is gets fired for some mild pushback over creative differences. There are disagreements in game dev all the time. People only get fired for it when it comes in the form of being a huge asshole to their coworkers.
Forging ahead on things that have already been abandoned is more than mild pushback, though. Creative differences and mild pushback is discussion and argument and pressure and using social capital; it's not going rogue to enact something that's a hot-button issue that could result in major legal consequences for the entire team. (I think it would have been
incredibly brave, relatively speaking, to do that, but given the time the game was made, I think it's at least understandable why it went down this way. Shitty, absolutely. But understandable, imo.)
