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teaandgames · 5 years

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Devil’s Advocate - Is Romance A Good Thing?

The Question - If you find yourself in an RPG, eventually you’re going to have a companion following you. They’ll be fighting your battles by your side, camping down in harsh winters and sharing your meagre supplies. It’s only inevitable that you’re going to get closer. And when the sun is shining just right, and you’re in the perfect spot, maybe you’ll ask them to go out with you. Wouldn’t that be great? Well, yes and no. Romance can giveth and romance can taketh. Are romanceable companions a good idea? Yes! - Humankind thrives on love. Giving us the ability to portray that in a video game can only make things stronger. It also gives characters a deeper storyline and means that your actions have consequences. What’s more, it can add to the replayability of a game. No! - Making characters pander around the player character can only weaken them. It’s better for any romance to happen more organically around NPC characters, who will have more of a concrete personality than the player. At best, romance is a cheesy novel. At worst, it’s a sex scene in a horror film. Fight!

Yes - We play roleplaying games to roleplay. We roleplay being a warrior so we can fight dragons, a blacksmith so we can craft swords to fight dragons or a gardener. So we can be healthy to fight dragons, I guess. It makes sense that romance is going to be a part of that. If we see a character whose personality we click with, doesn’t it make sense for our player character to make a move? Like it or not, love is a pretty important part of human life. I doubt there’d be so many babies around without it.

After all, RPGs go to great strides to make sure their characters are written as strongly as possible. The ideal is to recreate a simulation of a real person, after all. That’s why they’re voice acted, motion capped, all of that. The whole point of the writing is to make deep, functional characters. It only makes sense that we’re going to click with them.

No - Yeah but the problem there is that, from the player’s perspective, this love is entirely manipulative. Because there’s also one set path to romance in these things and quite often, to get to that outcome, we have to say things that we wouldn’t actually say in real life. I’m reminded of trying to romance Leliana in Dragon Age Origins. At one point, she started talking about shoes. It was my first run through so I decided to act as I would in real life. As my lack of interest about shoes is akin to a black hole, I responded with a sort of noncommittal noise. That ruined the romance, apparently.

Instead, I have to pander in the right way in order to get the romance, resulting in a player character with such a muddled personality that it becomes almost irrelevant. The same story happens with the characters too, really. While romance is a way to dig up some more information about the character, there’s no getting around the fact that they are drawn towards the player character for no real reason other than some light flirting or a mound of gifts. I almost respect the Fable way of doing it. Arm pumps and diamonds.

Yes - I must disagree on that. While the player character may not make a big impact, that’s almost irrelevant really. Our actions in a game are never really going to live up to what we think in real life, after all. Not until the Matrix becomes a reality anyway. Player characters are always going to be slightly mad. What romance does, on the other hand, is allow us to naturally learn more about the people we like. Part of romance is trust, after all, and trust tends to make people open up about themselves.

I’m playing My Time at Portia at the moment and that’s coming across there too. I’m in the midst of romancing the nurse, Phyllis, and part of the dating section is sitting on a bench under a tree. We shoot the breeze and learn more about the person we’re interested in. It feels like a natural exchange, two people falling in love. That’s how it should be. Phyllis would be just as interesting without that, I just wouldn’t know it.

This way we can know as much or as little about the characters as we want. Characters we like, we grow closer together with. Whether by chatting to them or, yes, by showering them with gifts. Either way, it makes the characters even deeper.

No - And that, my relentlessly positive friend, is rather the problem. All the other people in the romance are going to naturally be deeper than us. Protagonists are generally the most unlikable people in a game anyway. Either they have as much personality as a lump of granite, and instead just go all over the place, or they suffer from having to fulfill the role of keeping the player in the loop. Why burden a romance by including the least interesting person there in it?

See, the point of this section is not to decry romance in general, it’s romance with the player character that’s in question here. Romance between NPCs has a lot more promise, however. We saw that with Parvati, the lovably naive engineer in The Outer Worlds. It’s that game that kicked this whole debate off after all, as there are no romanceable NPCs in that. I kind of liked that. It meant that I didn’t have to measure my words for fear of ruining a romance. I could just chat to people how I liked.

I bring up Parvati because she went through a romance with another character. We had to sail all over the galaxy, collecting bits and bobs before she finally had the nerve to actually go through with it. It was a fairly touching romance between two characters that worked well together. It’s like how the characters in Mass Effect date each other naturally if you don’t. It’s almost like the player is an unwelcome wrench in an otherwise serviceable relationship.

Yes - Leaving aside the strange possibility that a game may be better without the player, one thing that these relationships do is allow for more interesting repeat playthroughs. While the main plot may not change that much, which characters we get close to will change. Replayability is always going to be a problem with a long form RPG but something like romance has a chance to add some spice to a playthrough.

Unless you just go for the same characters each time.

No - I feel like you just called out a lot of people there. As for me, I feel like shoehorning a player centric romance into an NPCs storyline can only make things worse. Better to have them interested in someone else where the relationship can grow organically, rather than just being down to the occasional flirting or gift giving once the adventuring has paused.

The Sum Up

Yes - Romance can give a great deal of depth to an NPC. It allows the player to dig into their backstories in a natural way and makes how we act towards other characters more important. It also adds a series a lot more replayability. On a more emotional note, it allows a bit more of ourselves to be injected in a game. Love is important, after all.

No - Romance can only drag down an NPC because it’s shackled to a player character, which is either boring or borderline schizophrenic. It’s better when the romance happens between two NPCs because they’ll inevitably be more fleshed out. The lack of romance also means you can act more like yourself around people without worrying about breaking the relationship. What do you think? Leave a comment, answer the post, send an ask, wrap your answer around an arrow and fire it through my window, I wanna know!

#The Outer Worlds #Mass Effect #My Time at Portia #dragon age origins #Fable #gaming #video gaming #Tea and video games #Romance #Devil's Advocate

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