Google says: "Romance or romantic love is a feeling of love for, or a strong attraction towards another person, and the courtship behaviors undertaken by an individual to express those overall feelings and resultant emotions. Romance is also the feeling of comfort and pleasure you experience in a relationship with someone you love."
What makes a romance?
Definition: "Two basic elements comprise every romance novel: a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending."
Google knows better. Good advice for romance authors in games - not sure how to improve romance for players? Ask Google!
Originally Posted by Ametris
The only abuse from the NPC towards the player I can think of now is the ridiculous kiss bubble of AA/Tav, so congrats on the achievement I guess? Are you proud of yourself? This certainly didn't make the romance better for me and the vast majority of AAmancers.
That's what the new word in Larian romance is - insulting to the player. Everything else has already been tried. Thank you for describing how it “works”. For regular players, for whom the game is very personal, who get into this game, fall in love, empathize, sympathize, want to give the world to a loved one. Who are not going to “explore” his pain! You weren't going to make a game for living people? Or, is it more important that a dozen or two fanfic authors can poke in their game all possible abuse of the character, write a couple of opuses about it, post a video on their YouTube channel, and jump around the author, applauding their genius? And the rest of the people who bought not a fanfic, not some “author's novel” with a “special vision”, but an expensive, promising amazing adventures, RPG (RPG for why is it written in the title at all, if you are not selling it?), who feel and experience the game, and not explore someone's “author's ideas”, why should they pay for all this? Not even with money, but with injuries, pain, and on top of that, to read illiterate opuses in their social networks, consisting of mockery towards them and their favorite character. Why not just write their favorite fanfics for “pain explorers”, why drag a fanfic into a game played by a lot of people who have never read and don't want to read, much less see it and “study pain” on themselves in their own game? No, I'm not a masochist, I'm just not a sadist, and I'm not going to do that on Astarion. There are plenty of horrible things to do towards him in the story, and... you can't love him, no! Who's Cazador 2.0 here?
Originally Posted by Ametris
It looks like the author is trying to merge two different types of media and acting like some kind of activist and self-proclaimed pioneer and relationship expert, while not understanding the basic concept of romance.
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Originally Posted by Ametris
This is not romance, this is THE END of it.
Originally Posted by Ametris
"There were some notes in the kennels saying that Cazador got pissed because he couldn’t control Astarion, so he flayed Astarion alive over and over again until Astarion couldn’t be put together in human form anymore."
Yeah, that's how you can play it. For a good hero who hates vampires because they are monsters.
Someone reads these entries in their game and thinks, “Oh, how interesting! What an unexpected twist!” “Oh, come on, come on, I'm just playing ‘good’, how can you pick on a person because of a game, the authors gave that opportunity.” “You killed 7000 innocents, oh poor children, you're evil!”
Larian, who are you giving all the opportunities in your game for?
