Games

I'll take a lore GF.

author isn’t playing with the dolls correctly in bg3 your imagination has to fill in the dialogue gaps bc they couldn’t voice act the characters reminiscing about how you saved each others asses in however many fights before the frog lady starts deep throating the dragon man

How dare you insinuate mine and Shadowheart's relationship was just a "lore dump". That's my wife you're talking about, bucko.

Dragon age taught me that if i give enough gifts to someone they’ll fall in love with me. It totally works

This is true for RPGs but I feel like the author of this article is completely skipping over the management games, like the Sims or Dwarf Fortress. Stories that are created through experiences characters undergo together are believable.

I can't see how you can even get away from the concept of simply filling up a love meter and being rewarded with new quest unlocks and lore drops by doing so. Not in a traditional pre-written quest game.

You have to write stories through shared experiences in order to deliver believable relationships in a game format.

While a lot of RPGs now depict romance (the thing that happens in real life (or so I have heard)), they don't really do Romance (the genre). The Witcher 3 is kind of half an exception, as mentioned in the article, and I think it's because Geralt has an untraditional amount of internality for an RPG protagonist.

I disagree that there hasn't been progress, though. Baldur's Gate 3's romance with all its flaws is still a huge step up from the Mass Effect style "aggressively flirt with your subordinate five times to have a totally sweet humping scene with them before the final mission"

This is Visual Novel erasure! :yells-at-cloud: Good article.

I usually skip romance arcs because they are so painfully cringe to wade through. The exceptions are, for the most part, movies by another name (eg FFX) and can play to a film's strengths in writing and acting.

The major problem is the interactive medium of games itself; how can one build a compelling organic romance when there can be nearly limitless choices? It's like how traditional stories in Open World games cannot have any real tension because it removes the freedom from the player. I think what makes romances in films, plays, and books work is because you are always one step removed in the observer's position. This distance is much blurrier in games because you are directing and making choices for the character, and obliterated when you are the character doing the romancing. Then there's the ugly truth in games that simulating Reality is often not fun. Accurate physics is actually pretty boring and hard. Going through a virtual breakup sounds like a cyberpunk dystopian hell. Then there's the game save which renders any important decision moot. This video talks about how failure/difficulty in games is itself difficult to design because we don't like failure. It touches on romances too.. A big point he makes is how a game cannot take the player aside, gauge their reaction to events, and adjust itself. Without this feedback all we have are dialog trees and stats. Then there is the risk we get what we ask for, and players start legitimately romancing their NPC characters like this MIT study is suggesting happening with current generation chatbots.