It was one of the stretch goals we achieved, if that counts as a promise. When he announced the Love & Hate stretch goal, Swen also said he was planning to include romance anyway, but by achieving the stretch goal they would be able make it much better. He even had a brief romantic dialogue he played as an example.

Also, given that another kickstarter update lamented that they had fewer female players than they expected, I understand they have been thinking about how much it is a real problem, and how they can go about fixing it. This is a feature that is recognised to have an impact on the female demographic.

I'd be very surprised if they ended up cutting it.

Quote

http://www.lar.net/2015/09/07/where-are-the-women/
Sidea Waswat • a year ago
(I'm a woman.)

I admit that I prefer games with rich stories and good character interaction and growth. I am a sucker for Bioware games for this reason. I loved Baldur's Gate on its own merits, but I loved that I could play a female and have my character in a relationship with a male - they were prepared for the female gamer. For the record, Anomen was a great character! wink

I admit that I was disappointed with D:OS because the story and characters were not a bigger part of the experience. The story and characters were great, that wasn't the problem. I wanted more immersion into the story, but the focus of the game was on gameplay, not immersion. The reason I liked D:OS was because the gameplay was amazing. I loved working through the puzzles, thinking through combat techniques, and figuring out how to combine items. I loved the physics.

I admit that I don't know any other women who played the game. But frankly, I often feel alone in my gaming tastes. All the women and male gamers I'm friend with, which is a lot, are not exactly role players. Sure, they love Final Fantasy, but that's not even remotely the same type of RPG. I'm the weird D&D fan in my group of friends. When I've brought up D:OS around them, they listen to me talk about how much I loved it, but none of them took that much interest. They were more excited about Dragon Age and the Witcher (I got incredibly bored with the Witcher games, for the record.) So I do think that C-RPG games are more specialty, and let's be honest, they take a lot more work and commitment than Call of Duty or Halo. I like the work in games like D:OS, but a lot of friends don't want to do work when they game. They just want to have fun.

Swen Vincke • a year ago
The narrative criticism is something we're susceptible to. What we're trying to do now is maintain (or actually improve) the same gameplay systemics and marry them with better and more immersive narrative. Whether or not we'll succeed remains to be seen, but that at least is the ambition.

Sidea • a year ago
Swen, I accept that D:OS wasn't a story-focused game. It isn't a problem, because that's not what the game was about. If D:OS 2 has a richer narrative, I'll probably just like it a lot more! It doesn't reflect poorly on the first game, though. I hope that a much more immersive story would attract new players the to games, as story-based games tend to do very well. I think it would be fun if you had a parody romance option too - something not to be taken seriously, but something fun. It would fit in well to the Divinity world. laugh

All this talk is making me really excited to replay the first game. I haven't played since it's been upgraded in my Steam account.