Hello All. Great game.
I'm seeing, and hearing, a lot of chatter about needing clear boundries for friend relationships among the NPC companions. The general commentary seems to be that all relationships eventually, or quickly, trend to a sexual advance. This seems to be putting a lot of players off. And while it's easy to dismiss this as bad faith, or trivialize it as "weakness", there very well could be something real here. Something seems to be going on with the social emotional needs of a younger audience.
I'm Gen X, and Quest for Glory was my first RPG game. I had to launch it from DOS and my computer had a Turbo button to get games to run. I've seen RPG games develop over my life, and I'm a game dev too. Assuming the world I grew up in, the NPC compaions are easy to deal with, and I see the video-gameyness for what it is. Great game. It's been a wild ride to see the evolution of "romance" go from fade to black to skinamax to where we are today. Also, I was in the theatre for 10 years... I'm super onboard with exploring things in the name of art.
But to be fair, current day, is not the world I grew up in... things are very different. With ever more increasing atomization, interpersonal relatioships truly are degrading to objectification and eventually transaction. It's glorified, commodified, and people are getting colder, younger. I think it's legitimate that a younger audience has a real psychological need for non-sexual friend relationships. We all have that need, but I made my friends 20 years ago and I've got lots of memories of a different world. What if interactions with Gale, Wyll, and Shadoheart are touching on something people truly want? What if there is an actual pain being caused when the narrative system kicks in for *romance* options?
I can see the implementation time and planning that would go into making narratives smoothly consider friendship vs "romance" (sex). If it were 2005 I'd recommend to production that it was a waste of time. But it's not 2005, or 1995. Do the 2020's have such a different culture that we need to consider different sensabilities? Maybe... probably... everyone keeps telling me so. Could there be a higher level mechanical solve for this? Something that doesn't threaten the core design goals of the romance system? Would it actually be worth the narrative and design time to create "friend-zones"?
While some of the talk about this subject is delivered, and handled, poorly. There seems to be something legitimate going on under the hood here. There is something legitimate about non-sexual friendships. A key element of those relationships is both parties being secure in the boundaries while arriving at those boundaries without some overt discussion/contract.
Well, what are your thoughts?
