There is one thing i find funny about BioWare ... once some fans mentioned that our Dwarves have no romance options except other races, they get all offended and start yelling that they are not our virtual pimps.
I mean, what is wrong with Dwarves? O_o
Yes. I’m all for designing companions as interesting characters with good stories first, and potential love interests second, and can understand why writers wouldn’t want to shoehorn in a character specifically created in order to be a romance option for dwarves (or other shorter races).
But at the same time, for me a satisfying epic story in an RPG usually (though not always) includes a dash of sex and romance, as it does in other media too. And once writers realise that there’s a pattern over a number of games of not giving a whole category of characters the opportunity for a satisfying romance sub-plot, you’d hope they’d question whether they were writing enough diverse characters of different races if there aren’t any that could reasonably develop a romantic and/or sexual relationship with the player character.
They don’t even need to be a companion, and in fact I’m all for being able to build interesting relationships with recurring NPCs. And despite the fact there was hardly anything to it, I really liked the romance between a dwarf noble female in DA:O and Gorim, as it had an interesting structure being a relationship that predated the start of the game and was brought to an end by events in it. It alone certainly doesn’t get BioWare off the hook for not giving dwarf romance options, but I think shows how they could offer much more variety in potential relationships without having to create a plethora of companions specifically for that purpose.
Hopefully Larian are thinking along the same lines too, as things aren’t looking particularly promising otherwise for having romances with characters from the shorter races.
(By the way, while personally my main problem with lack of shorter race love interests is the lack of suitable romantic partners for my shorter race protagonists who happen to be attracted to folk closer to their own size, I’m not for a moment saying that only relationships between races with similar average heights are valid, or that dwarves
should have relationships with other dwarves and so on! Only that any protagonist should have a variety of relationships available with different genders and races, but that personally I feel the lack of romance options with shorter races most as a gap when playing as one myself.)
