I think that a choice between flirting or serious would be a choice, so you can have either but not both. Depends on the character you’re playing. You can imagining the MC mentally assenting or not assenting to one of the serious choices, while actually saying something more romantic.
Its more a problem for me when its like “go to the murder scene to investigate” or “spend more time with the RO and if you don’t you’ll miss the chance to romance them.” Its not really super common, I can’t really think of a specific example off the top of my head, tbh, but I know I’ve seen it before…
And, like, I do get it. Romance subplots are subplots, but it sometimes feels like the game is going to punish me for wanting to spend time with the ROs. Which stinks. So… Don’t do that and the romances will probably be stronger.
Edit: Or if you do have moments like that then let us have other chances to spend time with the ROs?
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I think mods for Baldur’s Gate did it right . You have companions (added with mods) , and they had specific dialogues written for the main story , encounter and area . And you also had a window full of questions and Flirt . And you still get the scenes for romances , like the fade to black and the epilogues dialogues and everything .
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I can only tell you my favorite romances in games because maybe you can find what I like or rhyme or reason to it.
Heroes Rise Trilogy : Prodigal Even after death
Redemption Season: The only person my MC cares about is JK whether it’s incestual unrequited love or just “ain’t nobody got time for love” depends on my mood usually the latter.
Heart of the House: Loren the Nonbinary Amnesiac Maid.
Samurai of Hyuga : Masami only even though my lesbian Ronin is a pervert she’s devoted to Masami.
Guenevere: Morgana
Wayhaven Chronicles : Noone ever especially when the game goes out of it’s way to tell me it’s a romance.
Silverlands? Silverhills?: Control
Choice of the Vampire: Clotho but I didn’t turn her.
The price of blood: Lula
Community college hero: Dirty Girl maybe Stoic or Hijinx
Empyrean: The Tarzan Girl
Zombie Exodus Safe Haven: Jillian
Way walkers: the librarian
Non CYOA games
Dragon Age: lesbian leliana or straight Morrigan
Da2 lesbian Merrill
Dai: Sera
Mass Effect: lesbian liara
Mass Effect 2 Tali Zorah sometimes Jack
Mass effect 3: sometimes traynor
Mass Effect Andromeda: peebee
Life is Strange: Pricefield
Don’t really play many games with romantic options due to lack of games not personal choice.
I gotta say I really agree with this; it’s one of the reasons the Choice of Romance games always felt annoying to me. In one of the games, the second I think, four characters call you to talk about something but you can end up following just one; one of them being the monarch who is your RO.
I think this also repeats later on, making it so that you will have to keep following the thread of the character to the end; if you pick another character to follow you end up getting to their subplot without knowing what happened before, because you didn’t interact with them earlier.
Dragon Age and Mass Effect are games that don’t do this and are still great. You can talk to all your party members in the camp/ship before you move on to the next mission.
The game being like that makes the player be afraid and try to maximize their possibilities of interacting with one branch of the story that they wanna follow (like your RO example), disregarding the other branches completely.
A possible solution to this is to make it so that the flirt option that loops back into the same conversation (as in those scenes that you can ask a bunch of questions to somebody). So those who don’t want to flirt can ignore it and those who select it can still pick the other options.
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you had to be a dude for Tali and jack no ?
Unfortunately yes. The only time I ever played a male shep was for them.
didn’t you try that whole ‘switch’ thingy mid way? I know…I tried and failed…cose…urgh…
Btw if you don’t mind playing dudes for the romance , try Nwn1&2 , and Kotor 1&2 .
If you mean gender modding I’m a console gamer… if you mean cheating that would require romancing someone in ME1 and I had lesbian liara and Ashley and kaiden were boring AF. So I didn’t bother cheating on anyone.
Ah well that explain it . Nah didn’t mean cheating lol I never do it myself .
Hey I figured it’s better to necro an older thread rather than start a new one for such a specific question:
Primary Question: What’s your opinion of a game where the sole focus is romance, rather than something tacked on?
Secondary Question:
In my WIP which is exactly that, you find out about new ROs by basically pursuing rumours and doing your research. A few of them actively pursue you if you fulfill certain requirements but for the most part the gameplay loop is investigate rumour -> learn about RO -> introduce yourself -> break up messily -> repeat with someone new. The problem is that … it’s kind of creepy? Your character basically stalks these people for about a year before pursuing them.
The reason is of course to gamify it: if you’re not interested in pursuing someone who lives underwater, or who drinks the blood of the innocent, or who is sixty god damn feet tall, that seems like something you’d want to know ahead of time. It’s important to lay out that kind of information before you commit to pursuing that romantic option.
But in practice your character is kind of a creep?
Are there any elegant solutions? Or is it not that big a deal? Or would you rather go in blind and then have to figure out what to do if your new girlfriend is a hundred and fifty tonne fire-breathing death lizard? What trade-off should be made?
Primary answer: I’m completely onboard for a game with romance as the sole focus 100% all the way. I want it. Give it to me now. I said now!
Secondary answer: Your game sounds like romance actually isn’t the sole focus. If you spend a year studying your potential romantic partners without their knowledge then there’s some kind of umm text equivalent of stealth exploration. I’m not saying that your premise is bad. If you’re hunting monsters,even just academically, and discover yourself falling for one (or more of them) that could be cool, and not necessarily creepy.
One other thing. I’m not sure how much research I’d need to do to determine if my date was a “150 tonne fire-breathing death lizard.” Unless that’s a metaphor. In which case I think I dated one of those in college.
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Time moves really quick in the game. There’s no stealth exploration mechanic! You just click the “learn more about this person” button which then gives you some flavour text about what you’ve been doing while you gather information.
You then get a cool list of stats about the character, including their age, their special powers, their minions, their base of operations, and a few mostly-meaningless flavour stats like “standards of living”. Then you’re given the option to either pursue further or look somewhere else.
Now realistically speaking you’d probably have some sort of interaction with the character to get this information but I wanted to gamify it so the player is more informed about what they’re getting into, considering the romance sequences can be quite long.
Creepy is all about context I think. Obviously I don’t know much about the rest of this game, but it kind of sounds like you’re studying supernatural people for some reason, and end up dating them. So I think it’s a question of why are you studying them?
If you’re some kind of paranormal investigator who falls in love with your subjects then: Not creepy. If you’re specifically trying to date the supernaturals and spying on them…theeeeen yeah kinda creepy.
Reminds me of the game 2lesbiansplay/TheRPGMinx played / was in. The paranormal. club. Most were there to learn does the supernatural exist. But on girl was super thirsty. Werewolves, vampires, mummies, tentacle monsters, fish people. Anything.
werewolves
No but you can play as a shapeshifter!
vampires
Yup, and he’s based off the Bela Lugosi Dracula specifically.
mummies
None, but one of them is a skeleton, does that count?
tentacle monsters
Yes, complete with the existential terror!
fish people
There’s one mermaid! The “lure sailors to their death” kind, not the Disney kind. Also the tentacle monster is also partly a fish person.
Ahh wasn’t asking for or suggesting them just saying that while the other characters were looking for investigation she was a thirsty omnisexual.whuch the dating aspect reminded me of
I really think it would be better to just start your own thread for this, it’s unrelated to the initial question
I think there could be other ways of acheiving this though? Like letting the PC interact with the character before you commit to them. I think I’d prefer the chance to interact with them before I lock in their option anyway, so I could better tell if I’d be interested.
Pure love, rage and hatred.
Notable examples of this are Morgan from Magikiras, Ashleigh Wakefield from Deathless and Vitessa from Detective.
The first two are more rivals but they should still apply.
Friction in relationships can be good.
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