- Registrado
- 3 de Ago, 2021
Yeah, it's annoying when they all jump on your dick the second you show up - Pillars of Eternity 2 was when I first really really noticed this trend - but it's just... the industry standard. Characters often enough go on to be interesting, and it's just so jarring that they ALL suddenly drop their "we should date" lines one after the other once you reach a certain segment of the game - this happens in like BG3, POE2, PF:KM/WOTR, etc.
The bi thing is whatever, like you said there's more to be gained by letting people pick what doll they smash their self-insert up against.
And it's not to say that the romances in all those old games were necessarily deep, but they at least made some amount of sense. I blame the original Mass Effect for this - the romances in it are broadly fine and generally well-paced, since it takes a long time before any of the 3 companions express interest in you. But it really, really popularized this -obsession- with romance routes.
One of the biggest annoyances I had in ME2 was Tali: she went from being this awesome character with her own story, agency, and prerogatives to a dicksucker for the PC that desperately wanted to fuck you, and made it apparent from the nanosecond she reappeared in the game as an effectively totally new character. And despite the awesome lore of the entire species needing the enviro-suit, we're just gonna bin that with a macguffin so you can bone. Stupid.
What gets me is how... zero-effort the romance systems have been. They're just binary flags. You just say I WOULD LIKE SOME FUCK when all of the characters proposition you, and that's it. We have an 'approval' bar for overall character approval - why not one for romantic approval, too?
In Act 1, you beat back some gobbos (shocker, I know) and there's a big celebration afterwards. What if you were given the option to say something heroic? Well, Lae'Zel might like that a little, Wyll might like that a lot - maybe Lae'Zel begrudgingly likes your character more-generally for it, whereas Wyll both likes you more generally and more in the romantic context. Instead, maybe you crack wise and make light of the whole situation - Astarion, annoyed as he is at playing the hero, might nevertheless have his overall approval sit static but his romantic meter go up. Maybe Shadowheart or Gale talks to you in camp privately and asks you why you chose to do such a thing, and you get a suite of answers that could affect these different bars in different ways.
Maybe Shadowheart, Gale and Astarion like subtle, wry, dry humor whereas Karlach and Wyll prefer bawdy comments, and Lae'Zel is autistic. Romance, flirtation, courtship could be these genuinely engaging systems to provide a little more context to the characters and make their familiar attitudes 'feel' more genuine - there are plenty of times you can flirt with someone and neither you nor they think anything will come of it - but instead it's all written by retards with zero experience in it, who are just repeating how it was done in other games. DURRR BAR CHARACTER DETAILS BEHIND THE FUCKING ROUTE DURRR. In games that are effectively just hundreds of different systems and stats stacked on top of each other, somehow romance - despite sucking up a huge amount of writing resources - is not gamified at all.
In Act 1, you beat back some gobbos (shocker, I know) and there's a big celebration afterwards. What if you were given the option to say something heroic? Well, Lae'Zel might like that a little, Wyll might like that a lot - maybe Lae'Zel begrudgingly likes your character more-generally for it, whereas Wyll both likes you more generally and more in the romantic context. Instead, maybe you crack wise and make light of the whole situation - Astarion, annoyed as he is at playing the hero, might nevertheless have his overall approval sit static but his romantic meter go up. Maybe Shadowheart or Gale talks to you in camp privately and asks you why you chose to do such a thing, and you get a suite of answers that could affect these different bars in different ways.
Maybe Shadowheart, Gale and Astarion like subtle, wry, dry humor whereas Karlach and Wyll prefer bawdy comments, and Lae'Zel is autistic. Romance, flirtation, courtship could be these genuinely engaging systems to provide a little more context to the characters and make their familiar attitudes 'feel' more genuine - there are plenty of times you can flirt with someone and neither you nor they think anything will come of it - but instead it's all written by retards with zero experience in it, who are just repeating how it was done in other games. DURRR BAR CHARACTER DETAILS BEHIND THE FUCKING ROUTE DURRR. In games that are effectively just hundreds of different systems and stats stacked on top of each other, somehow romance - despite sucking up a huge amount of writing resources - is not gamified at all.
Astarion's voice actor is what makes everything with the character work. The dialogue itself is like eating dry turkey, but the inflections and intonations the guy provides - you absolutely believe it. I've met that guy before, I've been hit on by that guy before, I've had to tell that guy that I don't like man-meat before, he's gotten butthurt about being rejected before. The facial animation is also sometimes wonky, but with Astarion in particular it just adds so much and sells me on how much effort must have gone into it.
I do wish that they'd have copied over the glossary system popularized in Tyranny. While I like that no-one stops to explain what mind flayers are and what they do, I am also peripherally familiar with the series - someone totally new will get a loose idea from context clues in Act 1 about it... which could be resolved by just throwing some text that appears on mouseover (or with a button depression) in the middle of dialogue, totally optional to look at. The game has a line that states how unusual Gith are to see around, but it fails to mention how extremely uncommon mind-flayers are.
