I know I'm probably building myself quite a reputation as a "Negative Nancy", but it's because I sincerely believe that a lot of things, while they may not be impossible, are still very hard to get right.
Thinking more about some of the things which were posted earlier, I've got a few thoughts.
There are things that could easily sell the relationship in a game like this.
- NPC follow behavior often looks odd because the players can move in very irregular ways, changing direction, starting and stopping at random.
they could have a second set of voice prompts for when they're in a relationship.- Okay, but the stretch goal was love and hate, which means that you need a third set of voice prompts for hate. Probably more than that too. So that's at least five prompts: Hate, dislike, neutral, like, love. That's for each companion. Maybe more prompts will be needed if you don't want all companions to share identical lines. How many more prompts would that add up to be? I don't know.
text dialogue options could have 'my love' instead of 'my leader'.- I am cringing in nausea at the thought of hearing that. Different people will have different instinctive reactions to the relationships between characters. That happens in all types of media - if the viewer doesn't buy the relationship already, cutsey pet names aren't going to sell it. Plus, as I mentioned above, that raises the specter of having to do those options for a spectrum of relationships, plus any ones specific to individuals.
she could auto-attack anything that attacks you.- There's a LOT of things to take into consideration to get an auto-attack working right. What kind of attacks triggers the auto-attack? What if the attacker is far away from the victim, and the angry lover is a melee attacker? Are they supposed to auto-close in on the target? I wouldn't want my other party member to move on their own and ruin my battle plans and screw up the positioning. So that would have to only really work if the player and companion are beside each other and the attacker is in melee range, or the companion has a ranged weapon.
and or get damage bonuses vs anyone that attacked their loved one.- That's probably one of the simplest and easiest things to implement, but some people are opposed to gameplay benefits for relationships.
she could get grumpy if any of the npc's hits on you.- I'm not sure how often that could possibly come up. Heck, it'd be rather hard to believe a random NPC to believably hit on the PC, unless the origin is specifically written for that to make sense. And as always, there's also the spectrum of reactions along the love-hate axis to consider.
Along with some game mechanical bonuses, like 'cannot be mindcontrolled and made to attack loved one' or a stat bonus.- That will encourage forming a relationship ONLY for the bonuses, which people complained about when it came to the trait system in D:OS.
You don't need any cutscene at all for that. All you need is a good writer and a text field. Yeah, I know that reading is hard for some, but it worked perfectly for old games like BG2 so I don't see why it shouldn't work for DOS2, even with its focus on co-op.
So please, believable, complex, intriguing, interesting relationships (that include romantic elements) that built on text and the full imagination of its writer instead of cutscenes that are severly limited by technical limitations and the budget and that cut the imagination of its creator down to something that reflects none of the attributes mentioned above in the end.
And one word on "romance": I absolutely hate the idea of reducing the complex field of human relationships to "romances" as if they were something on their own, detached from all other elements of human interactions. I think romance should be in the game but only as part of a wide array and composition of natural and complex relationships and interactions. There is no need to attach quests to it like it's (horribly) done in DAI. It's childish, trivial and ultimately results in a bad narrative.
I think the biggest hurdle to romances in D:OS 2 will be how much they rely on systemics. Systems are great for handing simple generic behaviors, but they are not that great at handling details specific to one particular system.
Believable relationships in fiction are all about the little specific details that only happen between those two people. In D:OS, you've got a companion with a fixed personality and origin, and a player, with a fixed origin, but a completely variable personality.
Each player origin will presumably interact with each companion origin in different ways, and the temptation will be there to try and simplify things down to systemics. And I can't blame the writers for wanting to do that. There might be eight of them, but they have an entire game to write outside of the love-hate stuff.
