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Symphoric posted:The real problem comes from the fact that game romances are pretty much always written as masturbatory wish fulfillment. If they ever bothered to put things like real arguments that can lead to breakups, your chosen mate dying, cheating on you, or just turning you down altogether, or maybe informing you that you suck in bed and they found someone better, then I might support your argument. Of course, the nerdrage if they actually implemented these things would be colossal and I doubt any developer would dare, so they will forever remain a series of button presses that lead to awkward fade to black sex scenes and blog posts about what space elf sweat tastes like. I am pretty sure most of the things you mentioned are exactly the kind of thing people are trying to get away from in a fantasy roleplaying game to begin with. I would like to see romance plotlines more fleshed out and realistic and to have more trials and tribulations, but having a romantic plotline where your interest cheats on you because you can't make them cum is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard suggested in videogame development, and even then I think the nerd rage from the average gamer at having their guy character get NTR'd wouldn't be nearly as meaty and palpable as the goon hand-wringing at the scene where a guy party member turns out to be a huge misogynist and dumps his PC girlfriend because she got fat or didn't have big enough tits or something. I don't think we need daily reminders on the very real ways that real people can be terrible in our fantasy roleplaying games. Which, by the way, are kind of masturbatory wish fulfillment to begin with. Isn't that basically the definition of the genre in the first place? Romances never get done in a convincing way, not because your character can't be dumped for a terrible reason, but because nobody doing romance plotlines in videogames has the time, energy, resources, or willingness to commit those things to their development. So they end up becoming one-sided linear subplots at best (mass effect), and minor footnotes with an attached stat boost at worst. (Skyrim) Ironically, I'd say Baldur's Gate II tackled romance better than the games before it, not because Baldur's Gate II's romances were well written (they weren't) but because there was more than one way they could go, there was a lot of dialog, and the way you addressed problems in the world and in the relationship affected that relationship. You can literally commit genocide (at least twice?) in Mass Effect and keep your romance plots going.
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Feb 11, 2014 17:51
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GreatGreen posted:
I could spend all day writing a response to this, but I'm just going to boil it down to the following: Your first statement is the most ridiculous loving thing I have ever seen written about the topic of videogames or videogame development, or even for that matter, writing in general. I guarantee you that there are videogame romance plot writers who have been married since before you were born. The assertion that people who write these plotlines (and the implication that the people who enjoy these plotlines) are greasy, friendless, loveless neckbeards with no romantic experience is so outrageously stupid that it borders on insanity. It also ignores that a good amount of the people writing these modern plotlines are women, and that most videogame romance plotlines (hell, historically, not even presently) don't really resemble what you've described. Do you even play these things? If not, why do you care so much? Your response to me, though, it's really cute. Seriously,  I love the implication that I'm apparently naive or an egomaniac because I don't like the idea of a videogame romance where my character gets NTR'd or dumped because she was fat or something. For the record, I've been married for nearly a decade, I've been dumped for stupid reasons and been cheated on and I am fully aware of understanding what it is like to experience it. It's not a feeling I (Or any sane person) wants to replicate in escapism for the same reason nobody wants to relive any traumatic event through escapism. I don't think this is an outrageous statement or opinion, given that it comes up every day on this board in other threads. There are some things that don't need to be ported to gaming. Humiliating trauma is one of those things. Just because humiliating trauma is vicariously attached to something a portion of the time doesn't mean you have to include that humiliating trauma when you port the concept to videogames.
Mirthless fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Feb 11, 2014 |
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Feb 11, 2014 18:57
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MiltonSlavemasta posted:
I really like when NPCs in a party in an RPG take the game completely off the rails and out of player control, because every once in a while it's good to have a reminder you're not the only one there. DA:O was really good about this - at multiple points in the plot you could have characters turn on the party or leave based on the decisions you make. In DA2 just having the wrong character with you at the wrong plot could result in major events happening or characters dying outright. It's nice when the character of the characters that make up your party actually becomes important.
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Feb 11, 2014 19:50
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Kurtofan posted:Do you have examples of this in DA2? Isabella will try to doublecross you if you sell her out to the Qunari, Merril will die 100% of the time you take her into the fade because she's a blood mage, Sebastian will pretty much always double cross you if you side with Anders at the end and the entire party can fracture depending on who you side with in the endgame and what their loyalties to Hawke are. Also, most of the characters can leave at multiple points in the game depending on the choices Hawke makes and their relationships to Hawke. The characters in DA2 are surprisingly well characterized, the game's just short and kind of bad and the endgame plot is really poorly written, so you never end up noticing it. I believe there also may be a Fenris scene or two where he kills somebody you could normally save, but I could be misremembering that. Mirthless fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Feb 11, 2014 |
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Feb 11, 2014 20:06
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Jimbot posted:The thing that always bothered me with NPC interaction and romances is that they're always one sided. It's always you initializing and advancing conversations. It's always you who voices concern and fixes problems. The best bit of NPC interaction with the player character Bioware has ever written, for me at least, was in the Shadow Broker DLC for Mass Effect 2 where Liara asks how Shepard is doing. It was the only time (at least as far as I remember, maybe I'm wrong) where a companion of yours asks you a question on your state of mind and health and was supportive of you regards to your response. This was something I liked about Baldur's Gate II's NPC dialog. If an NPC in your party had something to say to you (or to another party member) they did it on their own, without any prompt from you. In most modern PC RPGs non-hostile NPCs almost never have agency. They don't interrupt what you're doing or seem like they're making their own choices, and if they have anything to say without you initiating the conversation, it's usually a quip or one-liner. Even the romance plots, as sappy and awful as they mostly were, were initiated by the NPC characters rather than the player, and you could stumble into situations that were relevant to that romance without actively seeking them out. The problem with giving the NPCs agency is is that people who aren't interested in the dialog or in a romance plotline tend to get offended that it's happening in the first place, so the developers end up going out of their way to make this aspect of the game as unobtrusive as possible. A lot of people just don't want to socialize with the characters around them at all. Some of the statistics for Dragon Age and Mass Effect's romances and loyalty missions and surviving final casts are kind of staggering. Mirthless fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Feb 11, 2014 |
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Feb 11, 2014 20:45
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Kanfy posted:To be fair The Witcher has never even pretended to be politically correct in any way, it's very open about its sexist nature and completely rolls with it. They'll laugh all the way to the bank no matter who gets mad on the internet. I just wish people would stop citing The Witcher and God of War like they're the standard example of romance plots in videogames.
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Feb 11, 2014 21:57
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coffeetable posted:What are the good video game romance plots? Read my post again and tell me where I said the word "good".
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Feb 11, 2014 21:59
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Drifter posted:Well, you said that you disliked people using those two 'bad' examples, so there would logically appear to exist 'good' examples that would not displease you being used as standard references. I My objection is in the intellectual dishonesty of citing them as examples. When you boil down a romance subplot to "Press Triangle to Aphrodite" or "Hey Baby, Wanna Fade to Black?" of course it sounds like bad, repugnant masturbatory fodder. I don't think Romance has ever been done well in a videogame. I also don't think it's an impossibility, but I also fundamentally disagree with the argument that romances in videogames are masturbatory wish fulfillment to begin with. The closest thing I can come up with for a "good" example is the romance plots in BGII. Yes, the writing was loving terrible. It's also about on par with pretty much everything else that passed for romance in the fantasy books of the era. But you could spend the entire game building up your romance only to never have it bare fruit. There was only a few paths to happiness for either your main character or your love interest. The plots made the characters feel more like characters and less like placeholders on your spaceship or at your camp. If someone put the level of time investment into developing a romance plot in a modern game that was put into the Viconia or Jaheira plots in BGII, I think an actual good romance plot could be done, just like it has in a myriad of books and movies and other popular media. I think POE is the first game in a long time that has the possibility to have a really good romance plot written into it, and the way people in this thread (and on 4chan, and on Reddit, because guess who shares the same general opinion on them?) are end-zone dancing about them not being included drives me loving crazy. My question to people like coffeetable is this: Why do you care that these plots exist in the game in the first place? If you don't like that aspect of the game, you always have the freedom to not participate in it. Why do you care about what other people find entertaining so much? How does it affect you in any way? I love romance plots in fiction in general. I'm not a big romantic comedy fan or anything but I like sappy expressions of love and romance. Plenty of people do. Why is it not OK for us to have fun too, especially when the romance aspect of these games - even the Baldur's Gate romances, which are by far the most forceful in the genre - are entirely skippable? Because some imaginary neckbeard might make a post about how a space elf's sweat tastes? They were going to do that whether a romance plot existed or not. Drifter posted:+6 Romance Personally, creating deeper bonds between party members in general is awesome and I love it when non-romantic friendship options pop up in games. Broing out with Sten (regardless of my character's gender) in Dragon Age was great, same with Wrex. Talking to Sten and Wrex at every opportunity and building an in-character friendship helped me to really understand those characters better. In BG II, I'd say the only way to even understand Jaheira or Viconia's motivations is to romance them, which is really a goddamn shame since they're interesting characters that seem flat and 2 dimensional, unless you're playing a male of the appropriate race/gender, and then suddenly you're able to get all that backstory and exposition. In general I want to see more chances to talk to and learn about the characters I'm playing with and feel like I'm building interpersonal bonds. Romance is part of that. It makes the game more immersive for me. Mirthless fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Feb 11, 2014 |
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Feb 11, 2014 22:44
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The Sharmat posted:That's not what I meant when I pointed out the Witcher 2. I added the '2' for a reason, y'know. Just saying. No, I understood that. I wasn't actually talking about you, people hadn't invoked the Witcher by name earlier in the thread but at least two people mentioned "Flirty dialog then fade to black" which isn't really a frequent thing in the genre. There's some notable moments in a couple of games (though they require some buildup) like that but for the most part that is kind of a unique phenomenon to The Witcher 1, where nearly every romance ends up being "Hey Baby, Here's a Flower, Let's gently caress". edit: I know the DA2 "romances" and the mass effect romances aren't massively removed from that, but they at least require you to talk to the character for a while and learn more about them. They're not particularly interesting or well written, but they're not 0-effort porn you collect on the way to 100%ing the game. Mirthless fucked around with this message at 23:03 on Feb 11, 2014 |
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Feb 11, 2014 22:55
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Otto Skorzeny posted:Arcanum did the dialogue-then-fade-to-black, and had some insipid romance, along with some comedic gross sex (you could gently caress a sheep if the PC was Scottish) Yeah, Fallout 2 did fade to black sex as well and it wasn't any funnier there. There's obviously some examples - Fallout 2, Arcanum, NWN and NV prostitutes, etc. But they're not really the norm, and while the Mass Effect and DA romances weren't exactly high effort, you still had to follow dialog options and read a bit about the characters before you could execute them. When the God of War / Witcher example gets cited it dodges the uncomfortable arguments of "But what if the characterization and dialog were improved?" and "Why do you care?" because the God of War / Witcher example is so hard to refute as being stupid, unnecessary and gross. I wouldn't be having this argument at all if every videogame romance was a sheepfucker fading to black as a ewe bleats over the soundtrack, (edit: Actually, thinking about it, that's kind of hilarious so I think I'd lobby for that to remain) or getting some noods and the sound of a girl moaning as a quest reward. I feel like the concept of romance has a place in videogaming, I think a competent team of developers and writers like the one on POE is capable of making a game that handles romance well, and if anything, the decriers should be disappointed that romance isn't being included. If the romance was awful and felt tacked on, well, there you go. You were right and there's an aspect of the game you can comfortably ignore, exactly like you were going to do in the first place. And if it ended up being good, wouldn't that be a win for everybody? Mirthless fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Feb 11, 2014 |
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Feb 11, 2014 23:23
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Lt. Danger posted:Actually I'm not certain the distaste for romance necessarily comes from poor writing or pornographic content. Certainly for me, personally, the choice to engage in a romance track or not is what I find uncomfortable - so the idea that "if you don't like it, don't play it" is actually the core problem. Honestly I think this is just a difference in how you and I are playing the game. To me, describing the choices you make in a game while role playing the character as inputting commands and manipulating the actors is just really strange. I mean, I understand that mechanically that is really what you're doing, but I usually get immersed in RPGs and end up forgetting that the mechanical aspect is there. I think I understand your viewpoint better now. I play games like Baldur's Gate or Skyrim or whatever because I want to be immersed. I like getting into character, figuring out what my avatar's motivations and backstory are, characterizing their personality, etc. I'll often end up creating dozens of characters to complete an RPG because I deliberately avoid doing things that are out of character for my PC. (unless I'm doing a speed/completionist run, but at that point the whole game ends up being 1 4 1 3 1 2 2 2 4 5 1 1 3 on autopilot regardless of what part of the plot I'm on because I've already done everything) I don't feel like a romance or a friendship dialog or whatever is a reward for picking the right choices, I feel like it's getting to know the characters my character knows better, and getting to know my character better. I feel like a CRPG can tell a richer story than a book or movie because I get to have a hand in it, not as myself, but as an actor playing a character. To be honest, what burns my rear end about videogame romances is that they're just a footnote. A romance is the kind of thing you build a whole story around, even if it's a subplot, it should be a major part of the game. You should be building up a partnership with the character, it should be a constant presence in the plot if your character is romantically involved with somebody, because that's how those stories work in stories in film and literature. What we end up getting instead is five or six conversations through a 60 hour game followed by an awkward sex scene and a "repeat that awkward sex scene" button. I agree completely with what ropekid said earlier - if you're not going to put the time and effort required into it, it's just a waste of time. I haven't done every videogame romance ever or anything, but I think BGII was the closest to getting it right. Baldur's Gate failed by making too many binary choices and by having really, really poor writing. Aerie's romance in particular was uncomfortable to sit through even for 14 year old me and I never managed to even make it to the half-way mark. I'm just disappointed by the choice to not include it, because I think POE was the game most likely to do what I wanted to see done, by the development team most likely to do it right. Arkeus posted:A bit disappointed about the lack of stretch goals- does this mean Obsidian thinks it can do most of it without aditional funding from more backers, or will the game have a very limited numbers of outdoors areas? If I had to take a guess I would bet that this has a lot more to do with the projected release date being so far out already. I doubt they want to hire a whole bunch of extra people to complete new stretch goals, their project managers have to be overloaded as it is and the more people you throw at something the harder it is to maintain consistent quality. At this point I think it'd be better to aim for completing the game on time and releasing postgame DLC (Because really, what's the difference between pitching extra money into the game's development, and buying a 5 dollar DLC?) than to continue bloating the project and extending the release date by a bit more every new goal. I mean, there's a point where people will eventually just lose interest in the project, and I imagine Obsidian wants to maximize the game's chances at success on the market at release as much as possible. Mirthless fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Feb 12, 2014 |
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Feb 12, 2014 01:18
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edit: double post sorry
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Feb 12, 2014 01:27
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Walking through identical forest tiles with a slightly different placement of Ettercaps and Spiders was rad as hell man I don't know what you're talkin' about. 
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Feb 12, 2014 01:32
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Alternatively, collect every helmet. Obsess over helmets. Get 100% helmet completion. Put a helmet on every shelf in your stronghold. You're literally a helmet cult. Go to crazy lengths to get helmets. Collecting all the helmets on an all godlike team should be an achievement. 
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Feb 12, 2014 03:04
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