The Official Romance Thread

[Stun]

I think once they have got through the hurdle of making PoE they will say "how can we now improve on the game" and they start looking at a Romance implementation

That makes no sense at all. lol

[BruceVC]

 

I think once they have got through the hurdle of making PoE they will say "how can we now improve on the game" and they start looking at a Romance implementation

That makes no sense at all. lol

 

 

I'm surprised you think that any development company will think that a game its makes is perfect and can't be improved on?

[Stun]

No, I mean, if they're seeking to improve the game, why would they decide to add romances to it?

 

That's like trying to improve a delicious apple pie you just baked... by adding Ketchup

Edited July 23, 2014 by Stun

[Sylvanpyxie]

 I would even go much farther and say that even low budget Hentai dating sim RPGs have better romance plots and options than Bioware had after Baldurs Gate.

Playing as a Female Character through the Baldur's Gate franchise offered me a single option for romantic pursuit - Anomen.

 

Anomen.

 

I'm going to let that sink in for a moment... The fact that the single character available for a Female Player Character in arguably one of the "Best Examples of Video Game Romance" is Anomen. Anomen... The living embodiment of an arrogant white knight cliché. If you think that Anomen is somehow better than any of the Bioware characters that came after, I'm going to have to laugh at you until my sides split open and my body explodes from the strain.

 

Don't get me wrong here, Anomen is a very well written character. However, there is not a thing in the world that could convince me his existence is anything more than placation for Female Players. He is literally where Bioware's idiotic standard of romance started. He was the very first fan service romance they wrote.

 

I'm not a lover of Bioware romances, but this idea that Baldur's Gate was the best they ever offered us is quite simply drivel to me.

 

/Opinions.

Edited July 23, 2014 by Sylvanpyxie

[Sarex]

Uuuuuuum, Ketchup. You can't go wrong with Ketchup.

[Gfted1]

Uuuuuuum, Ketchup. You can't go wrong with Ketchup.

Except on hot dogs. Mustard all the way!

[PrimeJunta]

So, does anyone think Obsidian will add romances to poe2 to please pro-mancers?

 

Not asking if you want them to; just if you think they will.

No.

 

It's conceivable they'll add them for some other reason though.

[Stun]

Uuuuuuum, Ketchup. You can't go wrong with Ketchup.

ketchupmancer. Edited July 23, 2014 by Stun

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

 

Uuuuuuum, Ketchup. You can't go wrong with Ketchup.

Except on hot dogs. Mustard all the way!

Why anyone would defile a hotdog with ketchup is beyond me.

[PrimeJunta]

Most hotdogs are so vile that the only way I can eat them is by smothering them in onion, pickle, mustard and ketchup.

 

A nice Currywurst now, though...

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

Most hotdogs are so vile that the only way I can eat them is by smothering them in onion, pickle, mustard and ketchup.

Edited July 23, 2014 by KaineParker

[BruceVC]

Most hotdogs are so vile that the only way I can eat them is by smothering them in onion, pickle, mustard and ketchup.

 

A nice Currywurst now, though...

 

I love hotdogs, I also enjoy Cheese Grillers and Bratwurst...in fact any sausage in a bun I am amenable to. I am getting hungry

[Blarghagh]

Guys, back on topic before I have to get out the pruning shears.

[Death Machine Miyagi]

 

 I would even go much farther and say that even low budget Hentai dating sim RPGs have better romance plots and options than Bioware had after Baldurs Gate.

Playing as a Female Character through the Baldur's Gate franchise offered me a single option for romantic pursuit - Anomen.

 

Anomen.

 

I'm going to let that sink in for a moment... The fact that the single character available for a Female Player Character in arguably one of the "Best Examples of Video Game Romance" is Anomen. Anomen... The living embodiment of an arrogant white knight cliché. If you think that Anomen is somehow better than any of the Bioware characters that came after, I'm going to have to laugh at you until my sides split open and my body explodes from the strain.

 

Don't get me wrong here, Anomen is a very well written character. However, there is not a thing in the world that could convince me his existence is anything more than placation for Female Players. He is literally where Bioware's idiotic standard of romance started. He was the very first fan service romance they wrote.

 

I'm not a lover of Bioware romances, but this idea that Baldur's Gate was the best they ever offered us is quite simply drivel to me.

 

/Opinions.

 

 

Oh, c'mon. Anomen was awesome. Way back in the day, I played a female paladin and brought him along to see how his 'romance' played out. Everything was going well and love was in the air.

 

Then he went off on a rant, openly insulting Mazzy for being a halfling who wants to be a paladin. He did this completely unprovoked and apparently for no other reason than because he likes being a ****. So I hit him in the face with Carasmyr and he exploded into bloody gibs. Not the most paladin-like thing to do, but he had it coming. 

 

A budding romance which ends with a paladin hacking her prospective boyfriend into pieces with a +5 holy sword. That's the stuff of soap operas.

[Lephys]

A) Add romances: Core content and mechanics are sacrificed so romances can be added.

The truth of that whole dynamic is so overstated, though. We can look at THIS specific example -- PoE's actual development and budget -- and determine that maybe they don't have enough spare budget after the core stuff's taken care of to spend on romance, and thus it's better left out. But, you can't really say that, in developing any RPG, with any budget, romance is always going to be some foreign body that must be specifically added to the core game design, and that it's always going to gouge out some of the rest of the game's design.

 

A game isn't infinite in design scope. At some point, you have enough resources for everything you wish to do in a game, as a developer. Everything within reason. Obviously, you could want to make 700 sequels to the game, eventually, and if you had infinite resources, you could just make one game with the equivalent of 700 sequels all in it to begin with. But that's the length of the game's content, and not the breadth.

 

If you want 20 weapon types, and you get enough money to add in 10 more, so you have 30, for example (weapons and their types would be part of the core game), then, if you still have some resources left over, are you just going to keep adding weapon types until you have 973? No. At some point, there's not really any further objective improvement to be made that spending the money on romance instead would somehow be wrongfully preventing.

 

Besides, romance is just character writing. If character writing is part of the core of the game, then romance simply adds to the breadth of the character writing. It's like adding weapon types, only it's adding character facets. If you just slap in a dating sim, it's doing it crappily. So no, simply having romance isn't inherently always better and never worse than not-having it. It depends on the implementation, just like anything else in a game. Combat can suck... dialogue can suck (with or without romance), reactivity can suck, quests can suck, factions can suck, the leveling system can suck. None of it is inherently detrimental.

[Lephys]

If that's true it would explain a whole lot.

 

EA: Hey, for this next game, make sure your writing sucks.

Bioware: Yes Sir!

I think it's more that they don't really care if it sucks. You know all those masses of promancers that everyone keeps complaining about, who absolutely adore Bioware's existing romances? I think it's more "Hey, for this next game, make sure we get those people's dollars, because market research."

 

It's kind of the same reason every Call of Duty rendition has them saying "Hey, for this next game, make sure the campaign's even MORE ridiculous."

 

As I said, it's not that they're specifically intending for it to "suck." They're not even rating it on a quality scale. They're rating it on a marketability scale.

[Lephys]

Interactive media has the potential to be a perfect medium to genuinely explore sex and sexuality. But that’s not what’s happening here. These interactions set up a transactional relationship in which women (NPCs) are reduced to a base sexual function. It frames female sexuality as something that belongs to others, rather than as something NPCs enjoy for themselves. I’d argue that none of this is really about sex at all, certainly nothing resembling authentic consensual intimacy; publishers and developers are instead selling a particular fantasy about male power centered on the control of women - at least in this example of female NPCs.

 

This then leads into the dehumanisation caused by objectification, inevitably leads us to the concept of disposability, which is defined as “something designed for or capable of being thrown away after being used or used up”. Especially when you have multiple female sexualised NPCs that you can go from one to the other.

 

Which means that these female NPCs fulfil basically the same function as items the player can purchase from stores. This is a textbook example of another component of objectification referred to as interchangeability. The player treats the 'object' as interchangeable with other 'objects' of the same type (eg. Female romanceable NPCs), and/or with objects of other types.” Since these NPCs serve an identical or nearly identical “resource” function within the game space.

 

So what we have here is sexual objectification. The practice of treating or representing a female NPC as a thing or mere instrument to be used for another’s sexual purposes. Sexually objectified NPCs are valued primarily for their bodies, or body parts, which are presented as existing for the pleasure and gratification of others. You even admitted that you need to be physically attracted before a romance can start.

 

This doesn't sound like realism to me. And since you call yourself a feminist, you're okay with sexualised NPCs in video games.

A) Which is precisely why we'd like romance to be incorporated into a game in a normal fashion, and not in a "this is just a minigame to get sex" fashion. For the record (and it's been stated many times before), you don't actually have to have inter-character intercourse occur at any time in the game, ever, to have a romantic emotional relationship between characters.

 

B) It's totally fine that we get to toy with NPCs in any other way we'd like -- sell people as slaves, make shady deals with mercenaries who will most likely have their way with villagers, psychologically torture people with cruelty, etc., but romance is where the line gets crossed? Pretty much everything else in the game allows you to treat all the virtual people like objects. "If I kill this guy instead of letting him go, I get more faction rep, and then, a nice sword! 8D!" Doesn't mean any of it inherently forces the player to treat anyone like an object. I'm fairly certain the whole point of a "role-playing game" is to play the role of a character in an immersive-enough world that you actually react to things as you would were you that character. Not just act like a child sitting at a computer who hasn't yet figured out that people aren't objects, and using virtual people to reinforce the idea that people are objects.

[Hiro Protagonist II]

A) Which is precisely why we'd like romance to be incorporated into a game in a normal fashion, and not in a "this is just a minigame to get sex" fashion. For the record (and it's been stated many times before), you don't actually have to have inter-character intercourse occur at any time in the game, ever, to have a romantic emotional relationship between characters.

 

B) It's totally fine that we get to toy with NPCs in any other way we'd like -- sell people as slaves, make shady deals with mercenaries who will most likely have their way with villagers, psychologically torture people with cruelty, etc., but romance is where the line gets crossed? Pretty much everything else in the game allows you to treat all the virtual people like objects. "If I kill this guy instead of letting him go, I get more faction rep, and then, a nice sword! 8D!" Doesn't mean any of it inherently forces the player to treat anyone like an object. I'm fairly certain the whole point of a "role-playing game" is to play the role of a character in an immersive-enough world that you actually react to things as you would were you that character. Not just act like a child sitting at a computer who hasn't yet figured out that people aren't objects, and using virtual people to reinforce the idea that people are objects.

 

 

A) And so you are okay with the sexualisation of female NPCs because that was one of the main points of my post. And what is a 'normal fashion' for romances to be incorporated in a video game?

 

B) We're not talking about torture or selling people. You're not even talking about romances when you bring up things like torture and slavery, and trying to compare romances to those other things. Very weird. I'm talking primarily about the sexualisation of female NPCs in video games. And you're okay with that. In fact, not only you are okay with this, but you're okay with the objectification of sexualised female NPCs by comparing them as objects to other virtual people because the game allows it to treat them as objects.

Edited July 23, 2014 by Hiro Protagonist II

[Lephys]

A) And so you are okay with the sexualisation of female NPCs because that was one of the main points of my post. And what is a 'normal fashion' for romances to be incorporated in a video game?

 

B) We're not talking about torture or selling people. You're not even talking about romances and trying to compare romances to those other things. Very weird. I'm talking primarily about the sexualisation of female NPCs in video games. And you're okay with that.

A) I'm okay with the non-arbitrary, reasonable sexualization of female NPCs. 'Normal fashion' is the same way romance is incorporated into real life. It's a part of their lives, and not just an afterthought minigame that they play. You can go through any given situation while in a romantic relationship with someone, or just as separated people.

 

Heck, it could even affect your character's Will/Resolve checks. "Open the gate, or he/she DIES!" Emotional attachment: -2 to Resolve check.

 

B) We're talking about treating people as objects, instead of people. Sex is just one of the ways of doing that. I'm unclear on how that's weird.

[Hiro Protagonist II]

A) I'm okay with the non-arbitrary, reasonable sexualization of female NPCs. 'Normal fashion' is the same way romance is incorporated into real life. It's a part of their lives, and not just an afterthought minigame that they play. You can go through any given situation while in a romantic relationship with someone, or just as separated people.

 

Heck, it could even affect your character's Will/Resolve checks. "Open the gate, or he/she DIES!" Emotional attachment: -2 to Resolve check.

 

B) We're talking about treating people as objects, instead of people. Sex is just one of the ways of doing that. I'm unclear on how that's weird.

 

 

A) And what is non-arbitrary, reasonable sexualisation of female NPCs? And 'Normal fashion' in the same way romance is 'incorporated' into real life? I like that. Romance has been 'incorporated' into real life! I've never heard anyone say that about romance in real life. Well the fact is it's been explained many times that romance in real life can't be incorporated in a video game with the realism that it is in real life.

 

Gotta love those game mechanics you come up with. Kill sexualised Female NPC, some 'minus check' to Resolve. Meh, I can get that resolve or emotional attachment back up anyway.  This is as far from reality as you can get, unless you're a serial killer and we are talking about 'realism'.

 

B) You even said yourself the game allows you to treat people as objects. And that also objectifies the sexualisation of female NPCs. Treating people as objects instead of people and sex is just one way of doing that? And you don't find how weird that is? Wow, just wow.

Edited July 23, 2014 by Hiro Protagonist II

[Lephys]

A) And what is non-arbitrary, reasonable sexualisation of female NPCs? And 'Normal fashion' in the same way romance is 'incorporated' into real life? I like that. Romance has been 'incorporated' into real life! I've never heard anyone say that about romance in real life. Well the fact is it's been explained many times that romance in real life can't be incorporated in a video game with the realism that it is in real life.

Now who's getting hung up on ultra-technical aspects of words? And arbitrarily quoting them all as if their status as actual words is suspect. Are you Dr. Evil?

 

Gotta love those game mechanics you come up with. Kill sexualised Female NPC, some 'minus check' to Resolve. Meh, I can get that resolve or emotional attachment back up anyway.  This is as far from reality as you can get, unless you're a serial killer and we are talking about 'realism'.

It's great that you love that, but unfortunately that isn't the mechanic I described.

 

B) You even said yourself the game allows you to treat people as objects. And that also objectifies the sexualisation of female NPCs. Treating people as objects instead of people and sex is just one way of doing that? And you don't find how weird that is? Wow, just wow.

Could you please explain why "allows" is in italics? Also, I have absolutely no clue what you're finding weird, exactly. It's supposed to be weird that I can observe plenty of ways in which games allow players to objectify people? Is sex supposed to be the only way one can interact with an object?

 

I'm quite confused as to your actual point, here.

Edited July 23, 2014 by Lephys

[Hiro Protagonist II]

Now who's getting hung up on ultra-technical aspects of words? And arbitrarily quoting them all as if their status as actual words is suspect. Are you Dr. Evil?

 

Well I am quoting you. And it is funny how you say romance has been incorporated into real life. It's not a word I would use and I've never heard anyone else use that word in real life. 

 

 

It's great that you love that, but unfortunately that isn't the mechanic I described.

 

Yeah, you just described that an emotional attachment can be used as a game mechanic.

 

 

Could you please explain why "allows" is in italics? Also, I have absolutely no clue what you're finding weird, exactly. It's supposed to be weird that I can observe plenty of ways in which games allow players to objectify people? Is sex supposed to be the only way one can interact with an object?

 

I'm quite confused as to your actual point, here.

 

You did italicise 'allows' in your own quote. So I'm doing the same.

 

So Lephys, you're okay with the objectification of sexualised NPCs in a video game. And I like how you say "Is sex supposed to be the only way one can interact with an object?" as if a sexualised NPC is just that, an object.

[Doppelschwert]

I can tell you what would change  this debate once and for all, and its a suggestion that wasn't popular when I made it on another thread, is a situation where every single RPG offers Romance. Its optional of course but there is no way that game X doesn't have Romance as a  mechanism of better party interaction.

 

If Romance implementation was mandatory in all RPG then there would be more expectations from Developers to create them in a way that resonates with the fanbase?

 

So it would be same as where fans expect a compelling story or variety of races to choose from. We wouldn't we saying " I don't want Romance " we would be saying "how can this Romance arc be improved""

 

We can then focus our attention on how to make Romance better instead of interminable debates around whether Romance has a place in RPG?

 

What do you guys think?

 

If you don't want to do a romance as a dev, what would prevent you from making the mandatory romance as cheap (and therefore bad) as possible in order to allocate more money to other sections?

 

If I don't want to have romance and its optional, thats the first thing in my mind that I'd expect from a dev.

 

How do you want to solve this? You can't have standards for this mandatory romance because they are highly subjective in the first place.

 

Your scenario does not induce the quest for quality you imply at all.

[Namutree]

 

If you don't want to do a romance as a dev, what would prevent you from making the mandatory romance as cheap (and therefore bad) as possible in order to allocate more money to other sections?

 

If I don't want to have romance and its optional, thats the first thing in my mind that I'd expect from a dev.

 

How do you want to solve this? You can't have standards for this mandatory romance because they are highly subjective in the first place.

 

Your scenario does not induce the quest for quality you imply at all.

 

This. I'm not sure why some pro-mancers think making the romance mandatory is an even remotely good idea for a wrpg.  

[Lephys]

Well I am quoting you. And it is funny how you say romance has been incorporated into real life. It's not a word I would use and I've never heard anyone else use that word in real life.

You're quoting me on a handful of isolated words. I'm not asking why you're saying the same words I said. I'm asking why you're selectively quoting them, as opposed to simply quoting me on whole statements. You've selectively quoted these words, but provided no reason for their specific emphasis. Except for "incorporated." It is evident that you feel negatively about that word.

 

Yeah, you just described that an emotional attachment can be used as a game mechanic.

That I did. What I didn't describe was the completely re-worded/tweaked example you presented above as if it were the exact same thing I presented.

 

You did italicise 'allows' in your own quote. So I'm doing the same.

So... you did it purely because I did? Or are you saying you did it for the same reason I did? Because, when I did it, it was to emphasize the fact that the game doesn't forcibly objectify a character by simply having a sexually expressive character in its world and allowing the player the option to interact with that character. The real world contains people who are both physically attractive and sexually expressive, and yet no one coded them that way. If they're sexualized, it's of their own volition. Thus, I can't really see the fault in virtually representing such a person in a game.

 

It's a bit redundant for you to emphasize the same word for the same reason, right after I did. Maybe there was a different reason? 

 

So Lephys, you're okay with the objectification of sexualised NPCs in a video game. And I like how you say "Is sex supposed to be the only way one can interact with an object?" as if a sexualised NPC is just that, an object.

I'm okay with exactly what I said I was okay with, which is not that. You keep adding words to things, and I know not why. What I'm okay with is the sexualization of NPCs in a video game. Obviously within reason, as with anything. I like cake, but I don't like infinite cake. That leads to an upset stomach, and/or death.

 

Also, I asked if sex was supposed to be the only way one can interact with an object, as if an object were just an object. It is you, just then, who just decided "object" means something else.

 

Objectification is essentially the treating of an non-object (namely, a person), as if it were merely an object. There are many ways in which one may treat an object, and, thus, many ways in which a person may be objectified. Sexually is merely one of them.

 

Do you disagree with that? I can't tell if you do or not, because you keep rewording things we've already said in interrogative form, such that they mean something different. I don't know if you're accidentally doing that, or if it is your intention to present me with a reason to clarify every single question you ask me.

Edited July 24, 2014 by Lephys