BSoda

This whole discussion over pricing is kind of pointless. It certainly wasn't budgeting that led to the exclusion of romances.

So it is finally confirmed then ? Not that it comes as that big of a surprise considering certain devs ...uhh... reservations concerning the topic from the get go. I will still admit that I am a bit disappointed by that. I would have loved seeing Obsidian taking romances beyond the BW teenage-novella level.

Indeed. I actually tend to see the opposite as bad design. Having all content available to all character builds kills replayability and significantly weakens the impact of the choices made by you, the PC. If you carry this train of thought to the extreme you end up with a Bethesda RPG where a magic only character also ends up being a master thief and world renowned two-handed weapons expert.

Imo gore is pretty much superfluous in a real mature game. Much more than romances which at least ideally contribute to the story / game. But ehh it's no skin of my back either way.

Hmm...nice interview. Too bad there is little new information in it, though.

We are already here.

Instead of laughing it off, perhaps you can provide a better example of an emotional scene in RPGs ? ...or at least lay out why this scene doesn't work for you ? (wooden animations ? dialogue ?) ...you know being constructive to the thread.

The ME3 duct-kid is an especially good example on how *not* to do emotional impact. There was zero connection to that npc. This coupled with the forced traumatic dreams of the protagonist just came off as a really obvious "now you must feel sad" ploy by the devs. Imo it was even worse because the game didn't even let you decide on how you feel about it -they automatically assumed that your avatar would react sad and thus override the player in front of the tv/monitor. BAD, bad game design.

You shouldn't read too much into that interview. Chris Avellone is not the project leader nor is he the only writer for PE. He simply stated that he's bad at writing romances...so far this has no impact on the game itself.

I somehow get the impression that you are not talking about 'romance' but love as a more abstract term. Of course love doesn't have to be sexual. Most parents love their children. You can even love inanimated things like a country. Thinking sex plays absoluetly no role in a loving relationship between adults, however...that's kind of naive. Trust is a big part of it, too -but that alone can also be found between close friends and siblings/family.

No allocation of resources to any form of mp/coop/lan mode. The sp campaign needs every last droplet of devtime it can get...too many former, traditional sp games went the mp/coop route recently...and not for the better.

I don't feel the devs should waste resources on what is essentially an implementation of cheating. If you want to break the game, that's fine -but please do it on your own clock.

This pretty much...and it's not "people" (as in a majority / consensus kind of reading) that say that. It's basically the anti-romance crowd latching on Avellone's interview because it validates their viewpoint and hopes for the game. That Avellone isn't stemming the whole project himself and that he in fact didn't even make a statement about romances in PE is simply contrary to their standpoint.

GTA IV is believed to be one of the (if not the) most expensive (non mmo) video game made so far. It cost ~100 Million A title in the sales-wise successful COD franchise goes for about ~30 million. The Witcher 2 cost around ~10 million. ...and I think BG2 was around 5 million.

Yes. Sadly, that quest was impossible to complete and player was left in the dark( Pretty sure it ended exactly where they intended it to end. Yeah. The player can't fix everything. I actually liked the outcome of this quest.