Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion The romance with Astarion pulls you over to the "dark side".

Welcome back, everybody. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I see there's a lot of people here. I wonder why. Well, it's such a pleasure to present our next speaker, Larian Studios and their Baldur's Gate 3. Have you heard of that little game? Yeah. They are at the very top of the best game releases in the previous year, and for several reasons.

One of them is how managing relationships and feelings in the game plays a major role for narrative. To elaborate this, as the companion character designer lead at Baldur's Gate 3, please welcome Baudelaire Feltemelch. Thank you, everyone. Thank you.

Okay, so it's my first time giving this talk and I'm excited to present it to all of you for the first time. So I'm here to share some thoughts about why video game romance arcs matter so much to players as a whole in terms of representation, community, and to them personally. Also to give some thoughts about the ways that we can improve the way that we design romance storylines in the games industry as a whole.

So I worked on Baldur's Gate 3 as the romance feature lead, but this talk is more about the general cultural phenomenon of game romance with a couple of Baldur's Gate scene analyses in the middle of it. So there are a few other parts of game design which can make such a life-defining impact on the players who play them.

This is the feature which causes a portion of players to take to their computer and write a literal million words about the game that they've just played and fill that with character analysis. And this is the feature which causes players to recontextualize their own relationships and maybe even break up with their partner of 10 years because they've fallen in love with the game character.

This is the feature which can shape a teenager's entire perspective on how human relationships work, not that slide yet, and cause them to approach with the guiding principles of how we've designed these relationship systems their own lives. And it could shape the philosophy of desire in your brain for years to come. And in the immortal words of Nerf Herder, you don't want a boyfriend, what you want is Mr. Spock.

We deserve to give these players better than seeing sex as some kind of gameplay reward. And I think we all know that the style, as we've seen in The Witcher 1, where you get an erotic achievement card for everyone you sleep with, isn't really on anymore. But I think we think it's not on, mostly because it depicts sex

as a gaming reward, and it's morally bad to do that, rather than also it being difficult and bad because it makes the characters really shallow. Because developer after developer is still really underplaying romance and shipping some very brief or very soulless versions of the feature and treating it like it's a bit of an embarrassing thing to include in their game.

For example, if you include a romance feature but you're massively underplaying it and giving it next to no gameplay time, like the fact that Pillars of Eternity 2 has a 70-hour gameplay time and about five minutes of romance scenes per character, you're sort of misunderstanding fundamentally why players find romance stories compelling and thinking they only want just a little touch of baseline sappiness, sentimentality, or horniness sprinkled into something. People want this feature out of a desire

for character depth, as they want any other feature that increases the depth of a character from every angle. If you're going to cram romance into 10 minutes of such a long game, hoping that you're just going to get a nod from the fan fiction demographic, people will realize that the fan fiction demographic themselves is just being pandered to tokenistically. When I was 12 years old, I played Mass Effect for the first time.

And I can remember that the first being, human or otherwise, I ever had a crush on was Garrus Vakarian. And I read over 3 million words of Garrus Vakarian fanfiction when I was a teenager. I went back and calculated them all in a spreadsheet at one point. And...

Being in love with this character changed my perspective of the media format forever. And this is my teenage notes app to prove what I'm saying to you. I realized that one of the million reasons I love Garrus is the 1% nasal voice, which I just love so much and find amazingly pretty. I could yell about Garrus' voice for centuries, but just that particular little aspect, yes.

Delving any deeper than three or four years into the Teenager Notes app seemed a little bit dangerous, so I didn't go any further, but, you know, true fad there. And being in love with this character really changed my perspective of video games. Like, I liked video games a lot before that, but this character and several of the other Bioware love interests had a near spiritual, emotional resonance for me as a lonely teenager who didn't have that many friends and had even further no romantic hope whatsoever.

It became my life dream to work on video game companion characters because I knew Garrus would never marry me as I don't endorse police brutality. I decided that I wanted to work on Borderless Gate in the middle of the time when I was previously working on Crusader Kings. I was very fortunate that when I applied after early access that I was suddenly made the companion character lead narrative designer.

During that time, I spent quite some while working on the romance scenes for the companion characters as a thing that I was being the most annoying about on a daily basis out of all of the companion characters' arcs. Also, occasionally, I would swap in and write some of the romance dialogues. I wrote quite a few of the Astarian romance dialogues in the later period of production.

Also, on the side, because I'm a terrible person, I am the main dialogue writer for the Dark Urge character, so I'm a really terrible person. But after working on these romance scenes myself, I know I will never be in love with a fictional character again, but I still want to see something new, something that will wow me and maybe even change my mind about that. So I keep thinking about how we can depict more compelling romance stories in games, and these are some of my thoughts I'm going to share with you guys today.

So no video game character will ever matter quite as much to me as Gareth Vicarion, for example. But if you in your games present a character with a good enough romance arc, perhaps it will impact someone's most personal heart. And when they're a teenager, they might say the same things as I think. And one day, maybe they'll even be giving a talk about the romance in your game like this.

So, in advance of talking about improvements for the sort of storytelling, I want to define that I'm not talking about scripted romance that is a part of a game. Things like in Monkey Island or Uncharted where there's just a romance story that's a part of the game. I'm talking about games which systemically design for players to make a series of in-game choices that lead to unlocking different romance content depending on their player choices. So,

Why am I talking about this specifically? Most of the time when you watch a romance that's on rails in a video game, it doesn't really lead to a particularly different set of feelings than if you are watching something on TV or reading a book. It's its own thing. It's sort of easier to sell because you can set up the whole storyline to have these scenes sort of integrated at points where you know that they're going to happen rather than leaving it up to the player so much.

But when romance content is optional and varied in a game, it requires the player, even if it's only a tiniest scrap of their actual interest, to contribute some of their own desire to the equation in the romance plotline when they drive their character to do that romance quest. And even if it's only a scrap of desire, that little bit of desire says multitudes about the player who is playing the game.

Why does romance in games matter beyond fan service? I've got some thoughts on this for the first big part of the talk. I've already said that for a portion of your players, video game romance can be personally life-defining in a way few other game features or features in any media can compare to. But why is that?

Number one thought about this, simulation of sexual identity is one of the closest to reality character traits that you can roleplay in a game. It's way easier to learn something about yourself as a player from playing this feature than learn about yourself from playing most other RPG features.

I think the reason for this is because of all the elements we're able to see ourselves in in games, video game romances are kind of the closest to life. You know, oh, I'm an elf. Like, is that going to get me any comparisons to my worldview? It probably won't. I'm playing neutral good. I see myself as an average nice guy, but I have commitment issues.

I'm a barbarian. I guess I can drink more than the people who are twice my height. But oh, I'm playing as a man and I'm kissing a man for the first time somehow just because in the game he asked me if I wanted to and something in me made me say yes.

Most RPG identity parameters are inevitably escapists, as I just said, but even in a situation where the romance in a game is going to be a little bit silly, most of the time when we are asked whether we want to do a video game romance in an RPG, we are still directly confronted with a question that's basically the same as the question we get about sexuality in real life, but we maybe just never asked ourselves or had to be confronted by it before.

So, part two, in games, people are forcibly confronted with questions about what they want out of a relationship more when they're playing an interactive relationship than if they were passively watching a scripted romance film or scripted romance.

I once got a message when I was sending out a game, Don't Wake Me Up, which I will talk about at the end, for beta testing for choice of games. In this game, there's a character who romantically manipulates the player in order to try and get revenge on them. This isn't revealed until the very end of the game, which is not available in the beta test that I gave the player, but the introductions of this character were.

And after I was in on the beta test, one of my players told me she had broken up with her partner of 14 months because she was so swept away by just the beginnings of this romance story that I had written and not aware that this story was meant to be fake.

And this is a story, even for a more real relationship, that I've seen again and again, people talking about. A lot of people have talked about it for World of Skate 3. Players are forced to actively put themselves in the shoes of someone in a new relationship. That can make them recontextualize their own life. I mean, that's what art is meant to do anyway. Art is meant to make you rethink your position in life, and that's the mirror to nature principle.

But because of the self-insert nature of video games being so strong, players can feel this on a fundamental, instinctive, and interior level that you wouldn't necessarily if you are watching a story playing out externally.

Literary theorist Melanie C. Green wrote there is a difference between reading a book and being transported by it. Transported individuals feel as if they know media characters and, in some sense, may think about them as if they are real people. Sympathetic characters may come to seem like friends. In some cases, this bond may even help satisfy individuals' need for belonging.

And this to me is the difference between seeing a romance character arc externally in a TV show and playing through it myself in a video game. But isn't this also the kind of feeling we want to strive for in an immersive video game to happen overall?

But note a connection in this quote between forming a bond and having a sense of belonging. To feel known by a character, you must feel like there's a place for that, which you identify with in the story you see. And that's why so many people realize they're queer, trans, gay, you name it, because an RPG asks you a question about identity. You yourself are forced to give an answer to the exact same question you could get asked in real life, but the game makes you choose.

So, on to the next part. Why else do romances matter beyond fan service? Romance is one of the longest tail parts of a fandom you can possibly create. People will write about a good romance in fan fiction for years. The character analysis in those fan fictions will continue perhaps even decades after you finish making your game, if it is one of the most known game romances of all time. But, you know,

Still, players will continue to debate character analysis on that online platform. And they just don't respond to any other feature in that kind of manner that delves into such degrees of character depth. And for some people, sex and romance content is just fan service. And yes, that's God of War clips that I can only find on Pornhub because they're not on YouTube.

and some people get some kind of surface gratification out of it, and then they just never think about it again. I'm looking forward to checking out the concubine booth later in the developer showcase. But if you want a long-tail fandom for your game, you need people to talk about your characters and analyze every detail of them ad infinitum.

The more fans you've engaged in cyclical character analysis, the more word-of-mouth interest you will generate for your game. It's the same as creating a game which has enough build loadouts. Where are my build loadouts? It's the same thing as creating a game that has loads of build loadouts that people are going to debate ad nauseam. It's just another in-depth discussion space without an answer to continue players intellectually engaging in your game, or hedonistically, I don't know.

And also the next point, the last point, I think, of this section of the talk, why do romances matter beyond fan service? Because if you include romances, the fem and LGBTQIA community will automatically feel included in your fandom if you have romance.

This is because we associate having romances with being able to level with the fan fiction demographic as a whole and treat those fans like they're worthwhile. You know, the fan fiction demographic is, as studied by Abigail Dekosnick, an overwhelmingly female and queer space, and also including a romance feature in a previously male-dominated fandom, due to then successfully validating the fan fiction demographic, can make players, even if they're not interested in romance, feel like your game is
being able to level with the fan fiction demographic as a whole and treat those fans like they're worthwhile. You know, the fan fiction demographic is, as studied by Abigail De Cosnick, an overwhelmingly female and queer space. And also including a romance feature in a previously male-dominated fandom, due to then successfully validating the fan fiction demographic, can make players, even if they're not interested in romance, feel like your game is trying to include everyone more broadly. Like, I have to respect the

Pathfinder series, when they could have easily continued to appeal to the old school market, but in the later games, they've been making these quests more and more broad. So, take the bear scene from Baldur's Gate 3. Why did it make such an impact? This is what it meant to me while I was involved with pitching it.

Look, this was not in the depths of my subconscious when I was pitching it. A sort of shit-eating grin was on my face when I was pitching it. But this is what it culturally means to me. It feels like a watershed moment in gaming history, where the fanfiction community felt like we were not a subculture within a fandom, but the majority audience that the game was catering to.

just in perhaps one scene or, you know, in a series of scenes, but still the majority audience. Players in the fan fiction communities had been joking for years post-Early Access about the different degenerate things they wanted to do with Druid Daddy Holson, and we gave them an incredibly silly scene which takes an identity moniker from the gay community literally. The gay bear becomes the gay bear.

And we gave them something which feels like it's from the tradition of CrackFic and present it as if it's a mainstream game feature. And then you feel like all the time you spent horny queer shitposting with your friends in your Discord is validated. It is real. It is a wonderful way of engaging with the game. It's seen. And how many other games on this sort of scale have made you feel that way?

Not that many. I know because I was writing fan fiction about Baldur's Gate 3 before I worked on it. So, the second part of the talk, how do we make romance better for our players in our games?

I've just got a couple of thoughts that are tips for what I would do to improve gaming as a whole. Let's say that this will revolutionize gaming. Don't have your romance quest culminate at the very end of a game.

Games have a longer play time than any other media format now, and we have a lot of space to show the development of a relationship once it's begun that we kind of rarely take advantage of. One of the things I think was a big step backwards for the recent Fire Emblem games was the removal of the bewilderingly inventive relationship system that they had.

These games have now moved into a really conventional format, as with the popular Three Houses. In Three Houses, you pick a character to build a relationship with, and then they propose to you at the very end of the game. Romance and the proposal is a final gameplay reward, not consummated until the final boss is defeated.

or consummated right before the final boss is about to be defeated. It's usually around that kind of benchmark that it seems like relationships happen in games. But Romance in Awakening and Fates for Fire Emblem is actually one of my favorite implementations of romance in gaming because it is implemented as inextricable from the combat systems. You order your units to fight alongside one another enough and the characters then form a relationship in the classic video game trope of having a workplace romance, which is very disproportionately represented.

But romance is there as part of the ideology of the sort of Greek phalanx, you know, if you fight alongside your partner, you'll fight harder to protect them and they'll be less likely to die. But additionally, romance is just there in these games as a part of life that's constantly happening in the background, you know, and people are just forming connections because they're around one another.

And they also deal with a very bewildering conundrum, which is that due to a rift in space and time, they encounter all of their future adult children very soon after each couple finds each other. And all this is populated with narrative events combining every combination of characters the player could have chosen to match up. And to me, the Fire Emblem Awakening and Fates games use the concept of game romance in one of the most creative and outlandish manners.

You know, they're confronted with a really unique and weird social situation in, oh, we just started a relationship, but here's our child. What the hell do we do? It's all done as a part of gameplay systems rather than just being sort of like quests that you know that you're following to succeed in the romance. And the romance tells dozens of character stories in parallel rather than just being like,

a player wish a film were just for their character. And I'm not saying that these romances are the most moving or deep in gaming due to the fact that each individual pair doesn't get that much screen time, but it's a really experimental and cool interpretation of a diamond epic romance system. And I mean, like, look at this player's, like, marriage planning chart.

Like, this is a deep system. And, you know, I think it really walloped the series to get rid of this stuff because, like, I'd love to see any game that is integrating romance into it do something that feels like it's as experimental and cool. So part two, how do we make romance better for our players, is if you have a really unusual systemic romance in your design, it will

in your game design, it will stand out because there are not that many games that do stuff like this rather than just providing it as a single linear player fantasy for themselves. But also a footnote, for the love of God, whatever you do, do not include lollies in your game. No lollies. No lollies. So,

Part three, how do we make Romance better for our players? There are so many types of challenging relationship issues that exist out there in the real world, but we've just never seen depicted in games. This is still in a fairly early stage of being a feature that's even perceived as something mainstream.

You can just pick one of these challenging relationship themes and you can write about it. And then you can be the very first person who's ever covered one of these themes. I mean, when in a video game have you ever seen a breakup scene that wasn't just like, oh, I would like to exit the romance quest now and no longer pursue it? You know, when have you, as a player, ever wanted to break up with a fictional character in that game? When have you ever been cheated on?

When has a character ever come to you and told you that they think the spark has gone from your relationship? When has a character's mental health suffered from being in a relationship? When have you ever been gaslit? When have you ever seen your partner become abusive? And warning right now, I'm about to talk about abusive relationship scenes in Baldur's Gate 3, so if anyone is not down for that, that is just a warning.

One of the hardest scenes that I worked on as part of the dialogue writing team for was the dialogue handing abuse in Astarian's backstory. Astarian is a character who makes many hypersexual jokes and treats his background as a sex worker with apparent relish and levity to start with.

But once the player delves deeper into his romance path, he explicitly opens up about his background of being sex trafficked and pressured into sexual situations. And seeing this seems like it's a huge bombshell for the player after they may have gotten a first impression of a comic relief character. But if you read between the lines, he's only been presenting himself as hypersexual as a defense mechanism. For so long, people have only valued him for sex, and he adopted his persona to protect himself. And I hope that this clip is going to work.

close to someone. Any kind of intimacy was something I performed to lure people back for him. Even though I know things between us are different, being with someone still feels tainted. Still brings up those feelings of disgust and loathing. I don't know how else to be with someone.

And in one of the critical path romance scenes, actually later in this scene, the player has to really read Ballerina lines and make a story and feel comfortable enough that he's willing to open up about this past. And players who don't figure out how uncomfortable he is, don't go down this path of, you know,

talking to him earnestly and leveling with him about his abuse and discomfort can actually end up persuading him into having sex with them then at a time where he's actually just masking his discomfort and going along with it because it feels like it's the only thing he values himself for.

It's probably the single most evil action you can do in Baldur's Gate 3. Writing for that scene was one of the hardest things that I worked on in the game. It was harder than writing any of the Dark Urges murder romps, to be fair. In this scene, the player simply says all of the dialogue options that look like they obviously lead to sex, as you would often be feeling like you're trained to do in a video game.

Astarian just chokes down his trauma. He doesn't tell you, he doesn't open up, and he just decides to sleep with us because he doesn't know what else to do. And he only realizes the next morning that he was unhappy the whole time, and he breaks up with you for this. It's too horrible to show. It's not going to work.

Is there no internet in here? There we go. It's almost funny. This is all a game to you, isn't it? No matter what I say, it doesn't matter. Not if you get what you want.

In this dialogue, I directly wanted to make the player feel bad for having learned the mentality of click-the-right-dialogue-options-to-get-sex-in-video-games, as that's kind of been baked into us as romance players of previous generations of RPGs. In this scene, it's you click the sex options and you'll further traumatize a traumatized person.

And the optimal outcome of the scene as a whole is Astarian being allowed to put up a boundary for the first time in his life and use the player as a safe place for emotional vulnerability and earnestly and decide for himself that he doesn't feel comfortable with this right now. You know, these sort of foundations that is really vital to establish in real life relationships, the hardly glamorous side of partnership where our real value as romantic partners is tested.

So, on to the next part of... No, don't play it again. Okay. The last part of how do we make our romance feel better for players? Wish fulfillment is forgettable. Players who go to write fanfiction are just as interested in hurt as they are in joy. Hurt is something to analyze. Hurt is a dilemma, and behind it is a moral choice.

We pride RPG design in giving us moral dilemmas to actually debate over, and we can do better than just like, oh, who did you romance, Triss or Yennefer? Either or question when we're having debates with our friends about romances. Like, if a romance played out in an exactly sentimental, they live happily ever after manner, there's no reason for a player to think about it that much after the fact when it's over, which for everyone is forgettable. And I'm sorry if you feel like we were too hard on some of the epilogues of the characters in Baldur’s Gate 3, but you know.

Okay, the last point of this before the conclusion, how do we make romance better for our players? Animated sex that is explicit is always going to age. We can have something that feels alluring, titillating even, if you want to, but remember the explicit Dragon Age Origins sex scene that got laughed off when it was revealed at E3 the first time that it was showed. Yeah.

That's why it's smarter to rely on conceptually sexy foundations behind your seeds in order to sell them. Think about this scene with Shadowheart. She can't swim, and she goes skinny dipping. She learns to swim for the first time. It's an aesthetic scene, it delves into the themes of the character, and it isn't a full-blown

pixels rubbing on each other and actually they're secretly wearing underwear off camera because we didn't make the models for anything else kind of stuff. Like, you know, I'm not talking about that for Baldur's Gate, they actually did make the full naked models as you've probably seen, all of you. But, you know, you give the player something that will set their imagination going and sort of like let them dream the rest and that's the sort of scene that I often like the most.

Oh, and actually the last point, players find solidarity and community in liking romances that have unconventionally attractive characters, which is the Tumblr sexy man principle, as I'm sure you're all familiar with, you know, defined by Freud originally the first time. So, you know,

When considering what kind of romance characters you want to design, it's always the weirdest characters people actually find attractive and obsess over for a long time. You know, we're beyond obligations to make characters conventionally attractive anymore. It might be pleasing to the sort of passing fan, but fans usually rally behind the fact they like a less conventionally attractive character, and it creates a pretty rabid community for a slightly fringe thing within the tastes of the overall fandom that has a great sense of solidarity behind it.

For example, I confess, I was actually blindsided by how popular the Cortex-X Dark Urge was going to be as a ship. But in hindsight, I sort of really shouldn't have been. I love it, by the way. I'm so pleased with the fandom.

The thing was posted on Reddit with the caption, sometimes dreams do come true, and I really feel that so hard. But I shouldn't have been blindsided by the fact that this is really popular, because I spent all my teenage years finding these attractive. So, I really don't know what I was thinking there.

And I think that there are so many people who are into characters like this. I know because you're laughing. I know that some of you are in the audience. But, you know, there's a big sense of community behind fighting another weirdo like you and a sense of belonging behind fighting other people who are attracted to these sorts of characters. So, like, why not create a bunch of subcultures for your game?

So, to conclude, writing fanfiction is sort of the largest time investment it's possible for a fan to have for your game besides actually playing it. It's also some of the most in-detail a fan can possibly engage with the characters and themes within a game, writing their own manifesto to add their imagination to expand upon the base material of the game very broadly.


being able to level with the fanfiction demographic as a whole and treat those fans like they're worthwhile. You know, the fanfiction demographic is, as studied by Abigail Dekosnick, an overwhelmingly female and queer space, and also including a romance. And I think that there are so many people who are into characters like this. I know, because you're laughing. I know that some of you are in the audience. But, you know,

There's a big sense of community behind fighting another weirdo like you, and a sense of belonging behind fighting other people who are attracted to these sorts of characters. So why not create a bunch of subcultures for your game? So to conclude, writing fanfiction is sort of the largest time investment it's possible for a fan to have for your game besides actually playing it.

It's also some of the most in-detail a fan can possibly engage with the characters and themes within a game, writing their own manifesto to add their imagination to expand upon the base material of the game very broadly. So if you present your characters and romances as straightforward and sex-goal oriented, there won't be very much left for fanfiction to analyze and discuss.

If anyone is taking photos, this is a summary of the slides in the talk. I probably should actually get through them pretty quickly. I'm not saying you have to take a photo. I'm just saying that's the information of Part 1. This is the information of Part 2.

The very last thing I was going to say is that if you're interested in any more thoughts that I've had about video game romance, I've actually made an entire game about this phenomenon that I started working on when I was 16. And I worked on it for nine years. It's called Don't Wake Me Up. It's a cyberpunk interactive fiction game. I mentioned the beta testing players earlier who broke up with their partners, so do beware about it. But it asks the question,

What if video game love interest were sentient AIs able to respond to the way that players sexualize them? It's published by Choice of Games, and in it, Len is the main villain who's an AI who's been designed to be the ultimate video game vampire love interest of all time. He's been min-maxed to be as sexy as possible by his developers, and he is desperately trying to deactivate himself because he does not like the life that he's living and fulfilling fanservice.

So, if anyone wants to learn anything further, you could go into the depths of some of the very first writing that I did, which I still, like, think is good, good, fast, and fun, and it solidified a lot of my thoughts as to, like, you know, the principles that we've discussed in this talk. And unfortunately, because I went slower than when I was panicking and timing this in the hotel, I think it's just about to be over, and I don't think there's going to be any time for questions. But thank you all for listening. I hope you got something on some level from this talk that you enjoyed.

I hope we do have time for some questions. We do have time for questions. Yeah, we do. Amazing. What a talk. Thank you. It was really good. Thank you. Really good. Okay, guys, we have time for two questions, maybe three if the two are really short. So who wants to ask Bo something?

Anybody? Well, one. I was thinking that maybe everybody would like to ask something, but yeah. Can we get the microphone for the gentleman there?

I think if you make it a limited resources, people get scared. But first of all, I think I was looking forward the most to this talk for the entire event, and you did not disappoint. Thank you. So good.

I don't have any shaves, so you know, that's the difference. Now for the question, how do you feel about doomed romances? What we usually have in video game romances is, it's always going to work out if you know

the right buttons to press, you pick the right dialogue options, and you avoid the bad ending. But I don't think there have been many games that explored explicitly a romance that literally, even if you as the player are interested, even if maybe it starts out, it can't work out. How do you feel about that?

I think that there was a really good example of this, actually, in Fear and Hunger, where in the very first playthrough that you can play, I can't remember the name of the... Darcy! Darcy, the Night Lady character. Unless you get to Legarde, the character who's being tortured in under 30 minutes, he's dead, and she spends the rest of the game sort of like, you know, horrified and going into a sort of psychological spiral.

over him and that really sets the sort of tone for like how this character affected her she sort of had a one-sided like relationship of being in love with him and you sort of see the spiral of that that looks like it's an example of failing in a game because it actually is because the player couldn't go back and repeat that quest line and succeeded it but it's incredibly incredibly difficult and I thought that if you're interested in that sort of thing fear and hunger you sort of see the like

total and really challenging failure for a romance to take off, and then you also see the way that it actually does not work out, even if she succeeds. But I thought that that sort of inversion of the failure of the romance is always going to be the default, unless you sort of try really hard to reunite these characters was really well-designed. That is a good example, I think, of that. Yeah. Give it up for that. One more question. Anybody? Yeah, over here. There?

In the middle. Yeah, can you see me, hear me? Perfect. Well, okay. Fight! Let's take it up there. Proceed. Great. So the question is, which character was actually the hardest to write for?

So I didn't do the actual dialogue writing for most of the characters. I mostly did a sort of planning and design supervision role for the companion characters and then reviewed them. I was assigned as associate writer for a lot of the Astarian dialogues towards the end of production, so I definitely felt like, you know, I wanted to try and

deal with some of the really difficult themes that were with this character. And I definitely felt like, just like I said, that those scenes about Asdarian opening up about sexual trauma and also, you know, the scenes where he sort of fails to confront it were by far the hardest character romance scenes to write for the game. And so now, please.

Thank you very much. This was a wonderful talk. My background is in looking into the transformative effect of games, especially how people can explore gender and sexuality through games, and it's so wonderful to hear you speak of that and to consider it so intentionally in your design. I'm curious about

how you've approached conventions the way you have. You speak specifically of different design conventions and how you try to tackle them and how you try to apply them. I wonder if there's any other romance conventions you'd like to tackle next. Is there anything that you're particularly passionate about challenging? So...

I always want to continue to work on games that have romance plots if I possibly can. And I think a lot of it is that list of like, you know, I made the cry of saying that there are so, so, so many themes that are difficult in relationships that we've just literally never seen in games. And I would love it if anyone else begins to explore things like, you know, abuse, gaslighting, like relationships going wrong, etc. in a lot of detail.

It doesn't have to be me. In fact, it would be great if everyone was depicting games as much less wishful when in their romances. But I definitely want to continue to delve into those really harder themes and keep going further with that. I'd love to write in the future characters who are very explicitly gay, queer, or trans in any further work that I'm doing to go into my own experiences as a non-binary person in relationships. So those are the things that I'd really like to do in future.

Great, a big applause. Bo, thank you for being here. Thank you, everyone. I'll be around if you want to talk. Thank you for listening. We will be back soon. So see you soon, everybody. Thank you.
When in a player-driven romance have you ever..?
1. Seen a breakup scene that felt like more than an “escape” function?
2. Been “cheated” on by another character?
3.Been told the spark is gone from your relationship?
4. Seen a character’s psychological state deteriorate from a relationship?
5. Seen gaslighting?
6. Seen a partner become abusive?