Drowsy Emperor

I said this would happen. WTF now, how many topics do we need on romance in general and homosexuals in particular and they havent even started making the game yet. If there is a terrible and pressing need for a character to even display a certain sexual preference then by all means, let them put in whatever they want. But why would there be? is this a coming out of the closet drama? In my entire life I don't recall a total of 10 minutes of conversation regarding someone's sexual preferences. Its the sort of thing you know/find out if you need to know, otherwise you neither know nor care. Why the hell is this even relevant for a fantasy RPG? Its a fantasy game it has no reason to be representative of anything in the real world, quite the opposite.

What I hate about these discussions is that the pro romance people are incredibly pushy about the issue (in particular about the homosexual romances) so much that they spam the developers with requests until they cave in and implement these features over their better judgment and all we get in the end is crap. Like Dragon Age 2 for example. I've seen it on the Bioware forums, and I'm sick of it as its a gross misrepresentation of what most people want. The fact is most people couldn't care less about romances and given the option of choosing either romance or another quest they'd drop the romance without thinking. It took what, one day (?) since the opening of this forum for this whole, very vocal minority to step in and start a flame war over the issue without any knowledge of what the devs are attempting with this game. We get it that all the disgruntled Bioware fans want romance, however this is not about making a new Bioware title but about resurrecting a ten year old gameplay model and goddamn it, romance wasn't integral to it, in fact it was thrown in "just because". Baldurs Gate wasn't great because of romances, it was great because of an epic story in huge world, populated with cool characters. Those are priorities FFS and it would have been just as great without the romances. And we could say the same about Torment. I don't even need to mention Icewind Dale in this regard.

...Or we could all just wait for them to tell us what they're planning in this regard and then strangle each other over it. So far the majority is for romances, but the voting is fixed in favour of choosing such a response anyway with three (four actually) options in favor and one against and lacking the one that would surely get a lot of votes "I'm only for romances if the developers feel they are integral and important to the story they want to tell".

Hey I want it to be a 100 hour game, I just don't think that's gonna happen.

Its possible to make the player care about an in game character (even inanimate objects, like HL2 companion cube), but to make a convincing love story between the PC and an NPC is next to impossible. PC and Jaheira in BGII had something of the sort but that a very small part of a very large and long game and it made a sort of sense considering how much time they spent together and how much time a player spent actively playing the game - the romance would only pop up occasionally and not be a bother. They're not going to make a 200 hour game. Its probably going to be around 20-30 hours and every romance in that short a span will feel crammed in and rushed. @Casa. I don't. None of Obsidians writers have shown interest (a prerequisite of being good at something, because it assumes practice) in writing great romances. Avellone is more into philosophical themes, the rest, well, I haven't seen any particular preferences among them.

Because the inclusion of pointless romantic plots directly limits our gaming experience by taking away resources that could be quests, clever dialog, and using them for something that's to us useless. Besides, in RPGs romance (with an exception or two) = minigame to get sex.

Ah, romance topics seem to be spawning like zerglings. No. Enough of this idiocy with making every RPG into a hentai date sim. BGII may be my favorite game of all time but at this point I'm sorry they included the romances at all. What Bioware passed of as romance post BGII is about as realistic as the possibility of opening your wardrobe and stepping into Narnia.

DA3 could be good if you're allowed as an Inquisitor to torture and burn every single NPC (and the PC) from the previous 2 games.

Can't you gay romance people just go and play Dragon Age 2 again? No?

I'm just waiting for this thread to evolve into the "we need gay romances" from Bioware forums. Waiting with a shotgun.

BG NPC's may be cardboard cutouts but that was what they could do at the time. I just thought they'd add more quests and areas, and maybe new characters, but romances, really I read it on the BG forum

At this point I'm more angry that they tampered with the original game in such a manner. BG has a special significance for me and I can't believe that they did the same thing Bioware would do - its just so endlessly lame and misguided to even think that that would make BG1 (an archetypal, naive DnD adventure) a better game. Their job was to update the game and add some new content - and that's the best they could come up with? Bleh, whatever. Thankfully there will be an off switch for all new content.

There is no way to do this right. A real romance is half intangible thing where the stuff that's left unsaid is as important as the spoken words, where gestures and looks play a huge role, where subjective and indescribable feelings dictate the flow or lack of it. Its so complex and evolving, that an interactive computer game version cannot be but mechanical and crude. A non interactive romance is which the player is basically having a story told to them can be good, but what's the point of that in an RPG where choice is the ideal?

I play games to relive a part of my childhood fantasies, for nostalgia reasons and to get away from real world misery, social statements, politics etc. Stuffing ideas/beliefs down people's throats (like Bioware does) will just induce a knee jerk response (like the ones you can see on the Baldur's Gate forums now) so its counter productive at worst, ineffective at best. Its particularly bad because its always tacked on, never an integral part of the game itself. They could just make a game with a gay protagonist that revolves entirely around the gay issue and end this lunacy once and for all. Besides the gey agenda thing is in every newspaper, on TV, on the internet, in bookstores (with entire shelves just devoted to it), on the street (parades etc.)- are you seriously suggesting it needs more exposure? In games no less?

I have a suggestion regarding romances. NO ****ING ROMANCES! Ahem. 1. Romances in RPG's are a game of "choose the right response to get laid". There is absolutely no player involvement in them apart from accepting to be romanced or refusing, and he/she has absolutely no influence on the flow of the "romance".This makes no sense. Why can't I dictate the flow of the romance? 2. Its never been done decently apart from: a) Jaheira (although that romance isn't 100% perfect) b) Fall From Grace - which wasn't a real romance but a subtle thing, that was good exactly because it never happened 3. When it was included "just because they could" (like with BGII and PST) it could be seen as flavor, making rich games even better. When it was included "because everyone was yapping for it" like with Mass Effect and Dragon Age it made average games worse. (They couldn't bother making better squad AI or the shooting more responsive in ME, but they had the resources for blue alien sex scenes? WTF?)

Who the hell wants romances in BG1? WHY? Its a BG2 thing, like the only game where it was done halfway decently - where does this idiotic need to a romance in everything come from?

Its got the coolest intro ever

I DON'T BELIEVE IT, FFS! THEY ACTUALLY INCLUDED A GAY ROMANCE IN BG1EE. ****ING MONKEYS! That's their enhancement? Jesus christ, a year of work on an old game they just needed to polish up and they have to include such irrelevant bull****, just because some retards badger for it every single time. What the **** is wrong with Bioware employees, its like everyone who spent a day working there is incapable of making a game without gay romances, and feels compelled to include it every****ingwhere. What's going to happen if they get to do a Super Mario remake? Is it going to be Mario or Luigi? WTF!

Player housing means nothing in of itself. In BGII it was a few quests designed for a class/profession. It made a sort of sense that your character would, as his power grows, be noticed among his peers and receive some sort of status symbol. The De Arnise keep was a bit more complex than that but essentially similar. Housing resolves was sometimes problematic rejoining with NPC's during the Baldur's Gate games. Although it made more sense for them to go their own way and wait in a particular location than sit around in a house of some sort as if they were your spouse. it also allowed the designers to centralize a lot of character interaction making sure the PC was exposed to as much dialog and interaction as possible at all times. Considering no game can manage to be as absurdly large as BGII, where you could find new content on your third playthrough - the more content the player skips in a game that can't afford to skip content the worse the end experience is going to be. So in a way, its a good mechanic and partly necessary. Besides, just because Bioware made it annoying with Mass Effect and Dragon Age doesn't mean Obsidian will too.

1. Mixed turn based and real time with turns in the background doesn't work - see Arcanum. 2. Full turn based has very limited appeal. 3. The reason RPG's resurrected back in '99 was precisely because BG1 came up with real time with pause gameplay. Its the key innovation that keeps the game flowing and prevents it from turning into a chess match. 4. I liked TOEE a lot. It had a great combat system. However, the fights turn stale when the enemies are too weak/insignificant, too slow, have annoying status effects - ultimately in any situation when the player feels he doesn't have full control. When you watch the same 10 zombies shuffle your way at the rate of two steps per minute only to murder your favorite character for the third time you start reaching for things to throw at the monitor. Turn based is still good for games that require modern weapons. Real time wouldn't make much sense in that situation (yes, I'm looking at you Fallout Tactics) as it would be impossible to control. Otherwise, its history.

No full voice acting. Hire voice actors from Planescape Torment and Baldurs Gate II. That is all.

That's fine, I was just saying we don't need what passes for grimdark fantasy today, which is nothing more than a spin on the standard fantasy setting anyway. Considering they have a finished map of the world, I think the setting is pretty much decided upon and I don't know how much they're willing to change it if its already typical fantasy (and it certainly seems that way from the names on the map). I hope its not, because that would pretty much beat the whole point of kickstarter as an opportunity to do something different. It says three races there. Anyone wanna bet which three?

I recall that Torment had no need of race variation or cheap political subtexts to be successful. That's what we're going for here folks, leave your poor man's RPG's at the door. This entire line of thinking was started with the Witcher, which was fine as the concept was original at the time. But then Dragon Age had to include it, and now we can't have an RPG without foaming at the mouth racists in it. Its annoying now, so skip it. Forget these crude ideas, and give me a good personal story a la Torment.

Heh, did you ever read much about the Eberron setting that got made for DnD 3.5? The Orcs, Goblins, etc were the nature lovers and had previously had the classically inspired great civilised empire.. the elves were split between a "mongol horde" group and an "uber-fantasy version of egyptian style ancestor/death worship" (for the simplified explanation). Gnomes were information manipulators, spies, bankers and mercantile masters... That and dragons were not simple "big magic beasties to kill" but were more likely to be Magnificent Bastard manipulators wrapped in engimas, and hidden in the shadows pulling strings over centuries.. Eberron is nice, certainly better than the vanilla setting. I remember reading it and thinking that not everything was as clearly explained as it could be.

Don't forget to post your impressions when you start playing Startopia