Originally Posted by Zentu
I do get how romantic relationship an evolve but even those should add something to experience. Image having a deep relationship with Karlach and if something happens to your character, goes say under 25% health, she goes berserk. Going out of the player control as she attempts to demolish any enemy attacking the PC until the fight is over. In this way the relationships, in my opinion, would feel deep and meaningful.

To be fair, Karlach would probably do that for anyone she considered a friend. Not necessarily just for lovers or BFFs.

If we consider how long she's been alone and how passionate she is.

Which is one of the problems with this sort of thing, most gimmick additions for things to occur in combat would also make sense for people who are just friends. Rather than being qualitative of a deep relationship. People don't like bad things happening to their friends...

Really, when it comes down to implementing relationships into games one needs to take into consideration how and why relationships function in real life and see how (If at all) this can transpose into a game.

Like, for friendships, this usually in real life ends up being people you talk to and hang out with on occasion. But in a video game setting this isn't optional, companions are with you because that's how the game is (Unless you perma-death them or otherwise make them leave) and you talk to them because... It's an RPG you talk to literally everyone...

For relationships, you share more intimate moments (Often including, but not exhaustively being sex) and spend more time together. But this is just done with companions anyway by opting to have your preferred character(s) in your party anyway.

So often the only real way of showing relationships deepening in a game is by adding more dialogue options to find out more about a character (But there's only so much one can write about a single character, especially in such a flat scenario as a static face to face conversation dictated by a handful of prompts) or allowing the relationship to take an additional form (I.e. Intimate acts like kissing and sex) - Both often feel pretty shallow.

Perhaps RPG designers need to look into Dating Sims (The good ones, not the harem ero ones) and that new trend of AI Girlfriends to see how they might better implement deepening relationships in their games. Since surely the goal is to emulate that sort of thing? Where you feel like you've created a bond with someone.

With the secondary aspect being to better think about how to implement a deepening relationship because the constant iteration of "Attitude bar" always feels awkward. Though, I suppose internally that's how it has to work. It can however be implemented in a less overt way, so instead of just "Heres a gift for +20 attitude" or "Selecting this dialogue option gives +5 attitude" it's more nuanced than that. For example, if it's the first character you talk to when you enter camp. If you always exhaust all their dialogue options when you talk to them. Etc. Smaller details that show you appreciate them that build over the course of gameplay rather than static "Do this dialogue option" stuff.