There’s a handful of people in the games industry that make the news whenever they say something particularly interesting about the medium, and Josh Sawyer is one of them. The studio design director of , who was behind such beloved games as , , and , raised eyebrows when he said that he would make a third PoE game with a -sized budget, but that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:he isn&r𒉰squo;t sure it would be success🔜ful.
It seems ridiculous that such a pivotal industry figure wouldn’t be able to make a successful game, but his comments are on the money. Sawyer says that he feels “out of step” with the modern cRPG audience, that he doesn’t “have the pulse of that audience” anymore♑ in terms of what they like mechanically or story-wise, especially after seeing how Baldur’s Gate 3 was received. He also specifies that romance systems are a pain point, asking, “If I were to make romances in a game that were done in a way that I find appealing, would an audience enjoy that, or would they really actually even hate it more than romances not being in the game?”
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Digging into his previous comments about romance systems reveals more nuance. Sawyer made a post in 200🤡6 in which he said he doesn’t hate romances in video games, but he does hate “reducing love to shallow, masturbatory fantasy indulgence”. He points out that having “romance ‘victory’ conditions” for every companion can diminish those characters, and that he doesn’t like the idea of being able to “win” everything or “get everyone on your side”. It’s unclear if this is still how he views the issue, but even these early comments can tell us a lot about the state of romances in modern RPGs.
Unfortunately, this is still how many RPGs deal with romances, and how players have been conditioned to view characters. Just looking at Baldur’s Gate 3, people do speedruns in which they try to hook up with as many characters as quickly as possible. There are countless guides filled with checklists of things to do in order to be able to romance companions. Romances are just part of the game, another way to win, and while these relationships can feel organically built with sharp writing, they’re ultimately still gamified by players. People want to be able to sleep with hot characters, and it’s upsetting to them when they can’t. That’s also a contributing factor to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the rise of playersexual characters.
NoteEven I’ve fallen prey to this impulse – I got frustrated when I couldn’t romance Karlach in my firಞst pl🍌aythrough.
This kind of romance system has its place, but I still hate that developers feel beholden to it. Many of my colleagues feel the same, chiming in on our Slack channel to discuss the kind of romances we wish we saw in games. They said they wished characters would completely hate your vibe fr🌺om the get-go, or even pretend to be into you and shut you down. More platonic relationships would be nice, as would more “weird&rdq🐎uo; in the vein of Halsin in his bear form. Someone said, “I just want more uggos, but not played weird”. Everybody concurred that having an entire cast of characters inexplicably being into you wasn’t ideal.
For a medium where everybody’s always going on about ‘realism’, it doesn&💯rsquo;t strike me as particularly realistic for everybody to ไwant a piece of your characters. It’s wish fulfilment, sure, but more than being unrealistic, it’s not very interesting. Each different romance can be unique in its own way, with its own texture and nuances, but there’s little tension involved because you know you can get any character by doing and saying the right things. I don’t want romances to be predictable, I want them to do me as much emotional damage as a situationship would.
I don’t know if this is what Sawyer meant, necessarily. But the idea that romances have to be a certain way to appeal to players certainly hit a nerve for me, because it feels like this is the area in which RPGs have developed the least over the last two decades. The comment was relevant in 2006, and it’s even more relevant now in Baldur’s Gate 3’s wake. How much longe𒊎r will romance systems stagnate?
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