I totally agree about that. As I said, seeing a lot of the discussions in this forum lately about certain kisses made me think. Is that really all, people want from a RPG this days? The perfect pixel sex?
I'm not sure if it's "All" people want from an RPG. But rather, some additional thing for an RPG.
From the moment the first character was well written, there have been people who want to connect to these characters. As is human nature.
But overall, video games have rarely done much in terms of enabling connections to characters. Hence why we're still stuck on essentially the system that DA:O popularized 15 years ago. With the only real evolution being... Now we have nudity!
With the complete lack of socialization development in the industry, people are left to salivate over what little there is. So BG3 with it's kissing options and sex scenes are very popular because it's so "New and different" to the past decade of fade to blacks (Or cringy dryhumping)
It's something that's kind of odd about the whole RPG genre... There's so much focus on things like stats and levels and experience and skills and all this other stuff that's entirely irrelevant to actual playing a role. With very little focus on what actually defines a character, which is how they interact with others. Dialogue options and actions impacting a players relationships with other characters is literally the core of role playing. Your character is not defined by their stat block, they're defined by how they act.
Yet it never really gets much of a look, either because they don't care to or because they intentionally cripple these aspects to pander to people who like "Blank Slate" characters that can't ever interact with the world or its characters because that would ruin their ability to pretend they're actually involved in their personal headcanon.
Perhaps somewhere down the line, a studio will produce a game worthy of the title of RPG. That will push the envelope in regards to player interactivity and how it affects characters within the game. But until then, we'll be stuck with people gushing over "OMG kisses" and "OMG DnD is the bestest ever system ever made!" and other such trivialities.
