@taril, you bring up such an excellent point. Developers have played around so much with systems and stats and points, trying so many variations of how you level up and develop skills and in some casesd how you do things out of combat but fundamentally the way rpgs handle social interactions haven't changed since BG1. You pick a dialogue option from a list, maybe some stat or another will influence it, maybe another option you picked from a box of options earlier will impact it, and that's it. It's very rare to have a game really experiment with the social aspect of things. At best they expand what's been there before, which is great as well, but I feel like social interaction in rpgs aren't really looked at as gameplay the same way combat is.
I don't think it is entirely fair. While player's interaction with the conversation system hasn't changed much (you pick a line you want to say, our of several available options), complexity of conversation trees, what the game is tracking, various reputation systems tied to conversations has. To say that conversations haven't been experimented with would be as reductive as saying that combat hasn't changed as you still click on enemies and they die.
In addition to stuff I mentioned, Arcanum experiemented with mixing more systemic, "generated" conversations with handcrafted content, which allowed for an impressive amount of reactivity. Mass Effect worked on integrating conversation trees into cinematics, and Alpha Protocol used timer in coversations to quite an interesting effect.
What makes them harder to iterate upon is that they are content, rather than systems - in the end it still comes down to a narrative designer writing the content and setting up reactivity and players navigating through this content. Similarly quests structre gets more or less complex depending on a game, but they all work more or less the same way. Because it is the handcrafted content that makes those elements work.
Thus, every companion being romancable, means every companion must be sexy so you can have a hot sex scene because that's all that most games make their romance system about. Get approval receive sex.
Romance isn't entirely about sex. But that's as deep as any game really goes.
I do think it is a bit unfair - much more work has been put into romances than just sex scenes, but yeah vocal folks who care about this stuff do seem to mostly focus on... hmm... physical aspect of the relationship.
Sex and violence sells stuff - that much is well known both and games and beyond. And it seems that for many dating sim became core part of an RPG experience, and if one wants to reach as wide of an audience as possible including it seems like a good idea.
Seems to be, I guess thats why Sawyer feels like he's out of touch with modern RPG fans.
I think he feels like that, because quite clearly recent RPGs he worked on didn't connect with a such a wide audience as other titles (and Deadfire took its sweet time before becoming profitable). Not every RPG has to be the same, but it seems that is or was far less overall interest in JS kind of an RPG. though at the same time Pillars isn't exactly "Josh Sawyer the RPG". I do wonder if he was free to do what he thinks is best his audience would be even smaller, or he would create something that could stand better on its own.
