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Relationships in RPGs, or the maturation thereof?
cj iwakura
The Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered User regular
The Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered User regular
Anyone who's played JRPGs is probably familiar with the Eastern take on the "relationship", or as P3/4/5 put it, Social Links:
See also, Trails of Cold Steel:
You hang out with characters, ask some rudimentary questions, say what the woman(or man, occasionally) wants to hear, and you get "max" events, which boil down to... intimate moments, maybe?
(Depending on the game, or how suggestive the dev is feeling.)
And... that's usually it. There's never much else to it than that.
Western RPGs aren't much better in this regard, the main examples that I can think of being the likes of Dragon Age and Mass Effect:
Anyone who's more familiar with the games than me is welcome to correct me, but they seem to boil down to the same thing: reach a certain point with a character, you "obtain" some intimate moments, and the story is otherwise completely unaffected. (If even affected at all.)
Couldn't RPG relationships be more ambitious?
What if, like in real life, you don't just reach a certain point and everything stops?
Wouldn't it be more fulfilling if a relationship could mature and grow throughout the game? Have ups and downs? Make-ups and break-ups? Be integrated into the story?
Would this put people off, and be seen as too much "work", or too reflective of real life, and no longer escapist?
I feel like, as with real relationships, it would make a bond with a character more rewarding, fulfilling, and let a player really get to know a character.
One of the few examples I feel like actually work at this is, of all things, Katawa Shoujo.
Usually when you start a relationship, that's when the game shifts gears into a new phase: the ins and outs of being involved with that particular character.
So yeah, could games benefit from exploring this? Is this an actual thing that any games do? (If so, please name them, cause I'd love to play them.)
See also, Trails of Cold Steel:
You hang out with characters, ask some rudimentary questions, say what the woman(or man, occasionally) wants to hear, and you get "max" events, which boil down to... intimate moments, maybe?
(Depending on the game, or how suggestive the dev is feeling.)
And... that's usually it. There's never much else to it than that.
Western RPGs aren't much better in this regard, the main examples that I can think of being the likes of Dragon Age and Mass Effect:
Anyone who's more familiar with the games than me is welcome to correct me, but they seem to boil down to the same thing: reach a certain point with a character, you "obtain" some intimate moments, and the story is otherwise completely unaffected. (If even affected at all.)
Couldn't RPG relationships be more ambitious?
What if, like in real life, you don't just reach a certain point and everything stops?
Wouldn't it be more fulfilling if a relationship could mature and grow throughout the game? Have ups and downs? Make-ups and break-ups? Be integrated into the story?
Would this put people off, and be seen as too much "work", or too reflective of real life, and no longer escapist?
I feel like, as with real relationships, it would make a bond with a character more rewarding, fulfilling, and let a player really get to know a character.
One of the few examples I feel like actually work at this is, of all things, Katawa Shoujo.
Usually when you start a relationship, that's when the game shifts gears into a new phase: the ins and outs of being involved with that particular character.
So yeah, could games benefit from exploring this? Is this an actual thing that any games do? (If so, please name them, cause I'd love to play them.)
+1
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All that is to say.. if we're supposed to be hurrying along this critical path and we happen to make a relationship along the way, the couple would almost certainly be in that honeymoon kinda phase. There isn't enough time to develop those ups and downs because that time literally isn't passing. There's risk there of making any change to the relationship feel like a cheap shot, and I think we all know a big title like Dragon Age isn't going to take that risk.
I'd like to see it explored. I'm just not sure a bigger title that also has a romance arc is going to do it justice.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
I think the Witcher 3 comes closest. It uses defined characters with existing relationships to explore those relationships in more interesting ways.
"First date mode" is a very accurate way to describe how irritating most game relationships feel, especially in JRPGs.
Don't freak out if a guy touches your hand, good lord. It's like expression of romantic interest is an unspeakable sin.
Mass Effect immediately springs to mind! At least a couple other characters end up in a relationship with each other if neither are with Shepherd.
Speaking of Katawa Shoujo, that game had one storyline end in a heckin' great realistic way and it's pretty roundly considered the worst route / ending for it.
Persona 3 and Junpei/Chidori, sort of.
Final Fantasy XII and Fran/Balthier.
There are plenty that pine after lost/kidnapped/killed/monster-ified wives, boyfriends, or girlfriends. Secret of Mana, Tales of the Abyss, FF13, Breath of Fire 2, etc. Things with more ensemble casts (eg Odin Sphere, SaGa Frontier 2, SRW OG) or a lack of an actual protagonist (eg Grand Kingdom, most Fire Emblems) tend to pair up lots of people with whoever. Endless Frontier definitely had multiple orgies between its various pairings. OreShika was an entire crazy eugenic exercise in making every character fuck random semi-human gods and/or your friends' party members. And then there's things like FFX where an aging female character HAS to be paired off with SOMEBODY in the sequel, and uh, that one, no matter how little sense it makes.
Special shout out to Great Greed, a game which both had a rando girl who had a boyfriend, and who you could force to marry you in the ending anyway because fuck what she wanted. I mean, granted, you could marry literally any NPC in the final room, including the king and an 11 year old, but still. It was an OG Gameboy game truly ahead of its time.
E:
And I was this many years old when I found out that there was a scene in the original Japanese version of Great Greed where you're forced to sleep with said girl-with-boyfriend in an ice town """"FOR WARMTH"""" where you have to fight a wet dream of her.
Can't imagine why that might've been removed in the English version.
The Baldur's Gate series has Aerie and Haer'Dalis get together if you don't romance Aerie yourself. Khalid and Jaheira are also married already, if that counts.
Pathfinder: Kingmaker also has two of your party members, Octavia and Regongar, in a relationship with each other and most of their respective character arcs focus on the evolution of that.
Personally, I think that any RPG design that aims at 'romanceable' NPCs is unlikely to do so particularly well, because it'll always come up against the transactional nature of it all. If I were to work on something like this (and go bankrupt in the process), I'd probably start working on NPC stories and quests without a clear-cut idea that the player will be able to hook up with this or that character. Their personality and motivations come first, and they're written along those lines. However, based on how these intersect with the player and their actions, friendship and romance may be in the making - but they shouldn't be the main motivator for everything.
What could be interesting: a plot that, like Dragon Age 2 (if I remember it correctly), jumps by a few years in between acts, and what happens in between is driven by where the characters end up. Say your PC has developed a romantic relationship with two NPCs or party members: after the time jump you could be married to the one and have a child, but you're also in a relationship with the other. Obviously this kind of thing could get hellishly complicated quickly, but at the same time I would reduce the number of characters that may become romantically entangled with the player character.
All in all, I think that in order to do this kind of storytelling well you need to curtail the player's agency, because players tend to see agency as "I can do whatever I want", and this will always be at cross purposes with writing nuanced, interesting characters. The party members and NPCs have to be written to have agency as well, and this needs to include them saying no to the player.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
I've had ideas for characters to run with the concept of more nuanced relationships, I'm just not sure what sort of format the game would be. A VN feels too shallow, I'd want something more involved... maybe a la Tokimeki Memorial.
And the player could still have agency, they'd just have to cope with characters that very much have agency and wants of their own. There'd be fights, makeups, breakups, disagreements, etc.
Really? Who?
I could imagine the whole thing working in a CRPG format. Take something like Disco Elysium: you could take that kind of gameplay and structure but build in more romance, I'm sure. Arguably, there are relationships in the game that develop credibly over time, even if they're not necessarily romantic. (Though the flirtation with the fisherwoman is sweet and believable.) The question is how many characters you could include while keeping the scope realistic.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
That too, especially if things go too far south. P4 dabbles in this by having the "friendship" routes, though it's more caused by deliberate choice on the player's part, not an irrevocable screw-up.
Mass Effect 3
The first problem is that games are systems that do not easily reflect the messiness of actual relationships. Most games run on the logic of 'Do X and Y happens'. And this is fine when X is 'swing sword' and Y is 'enemy takes damage'. But it gets trickier when actual emotions are supposed to be involved because emotions do not run on this binary.
Of course, there is a solution to this problem. Devote intense amounts of time and effort to the relationships. Which leads to the second problem, most games are not about the relationships. They are about shooting the aliens to save the world. To make romantic relationships actually work somewhat realistically and not just be a tacked on checkbox feature, you're gonna have to invest time, and money, and effort. Time, and money, and effort, that the suits would much rather see go to the alien shooting bits.
The Witcher 3 managed to get around this problem by being, essentially, fanfic. Geralt's relationships are already established in the books and the previous games, so you don't have to do that much work.
In a more platonic example, Disco Elysium did this well because that game is all about our protagonist's wild, contradictory, messed-up emotions and how that influences his view on the world and the people around him. His evolving relationship with Kim Kitsuragi is practically essential to that game.
So... yeah. You want good, solid, ambitious relationships in game? Either have a solid foundation to work off of, or make a game that basically all about that kind of thing. Or throw a whole lot of time and money at the problem.
The Haer’dalis and Aerie relationship is actually quite good, I like it a lot better than the Aerie/PC route because it shows Aerie’s character growth over time.
I think NPC romances are doomed to be terrible because they're, almost by definition, optional. That, in turn, forces them to become victims of gamification, whether it's the crude way previous BioWare games addressed it (shower your target with gifts and attention, and tell them what they want to hear), or simply through dialogue choices, or by triggering certain flags in certain events. There's always going to be this layer of artifice because it's a separate game system, and can thus be exploited for 'optimal' results. It's never going to be organic or 'real', even if it appears that way at first on the surface.