NWN2 JE Sawyer on Romance

Neverwinter Nights 2
Actually, I thought the females got 2 and the males only 1!!

True - females got Carth or Juhani (sp), guys just got Bastilla.

I loved Bastilla - as a light sider she was great to romance, and as a dark-sider she was great to torment ;)
 
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True - females got Carth or Juhani (sp), guys just got Bastilla.

I loved Bastilla - as a light sider she was great to romance, and as a dark-sider she was great to torment ;)

Ah, I thought there were two females to romance, hence two romance options for the males :D

NWN1 only had one for the females though (and what a horible one, I so wanted to romance Tomi instead, hehe) whereas the males had several who at least hinted at the option. And BG2 had more romances for male characters, I believe.
 
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So what would people rather see:
- More romances similar to what we get now?
- Fewer romances with more depth?

Obviously the answer is both! But since *that* isn't likely ...
 
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Fewer with more depth, but some choice as to whom!! Who really wanted to have no-one but Jaheira as an option for example!! I ditched her as fast as I could. In BG1 she got killed and NEVER ressurected!!
 
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Who really wanted to have no-one but Jaheira as an option for example!! I ditched her as fast as I could. In BG1 she got killed and NEVER ressurected!!
That is why I was glad I played BG2 first ... it was a complex Romance all about balance and strength of convictions, and I wouldn't have ever bothered if I had played BG1 first - I *hated*her in BG1 as well.

Like the new Avatar, Sorcha - where is that from?
 
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Great job, Sorcha Ravenlock I like it very much. :)
 
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Sawyer's post really irked me, and I've been thinking about why. Some of it relates to what I do as a designer, and some of it relates to what I do as a player. It's all subjective, and milieage is going to vary for everyone, but:

I don't hate love in game stories; I just hate reducing love to shallow, masturbatory fantasy indulgence.

This is like Jessica Alba saying that she wouldn't strip in Sin City because she didn't want to be seen as just a sex object. Jessica, you are just a sex object. That's all you have going for you. Sawyer, you do write masturbatory fantasy indulgence.

When I come home from a long day at work, make dinner, clean up after dinner, and help put my little dude to bed, I've got about half an hour to do something on my own time before it's time for me to do evening chores and head for bed. I'm not looking for a sword-holding simulation complete with gangrenous leg wounds and a terrifying fear of combat. I'm looking to be the hero who whacks bad guys. I'm looking for comfort in the realm of the heroic. Yes, it's an indulgence, because I spent $60 Canadian to indulge myself. It's only a shallow indulgence if it's badly written.

Maybe that's all love is to some people, but I think that's a pretty narrow view. Ego-stroking is very popular in CRPGs, which is one reason I don't feel comfortable doing CRPG writing anymore.

And anyone who feels differently from Sawyer is therefore a narrow-minded masturbatory writer.

I appreciate that people wanted more romance options in NWN2, but sometimes I think that people want there to be romance "victory" conditions for all companions. I think that can diminish some characters.

Imagine that coming out of the mouth of your DM. Every time I've heard the DM scold the players for wanting to "win", every time, it ends up being one of two things:

1) The players want a simple victory, and the DM wants to give more shades of gray and moral ambiguity, which ends up being a case of the players and the DM wanting two different things.
2) The DM is railroading the players.

If it's (2), you're taking choice away from the players in the hopes of telling a good story. That's either a sign of clumsiness or an indication that you're working in the wrong genre.

If it's (1), well, different people want different things. In a tabletop game with buddies, that's all well and good, and either the game changes or the group breaks up. In a product that everyone paid $60 Canadian to buy, "You are a stupid immature person for wanting that" is a line of argument you want to use carefully. Don't get me wrong -- there are gonna be people who want stuff in Mass Effect that isn't gonna be there. There are people saying that Dragon Age will be pointless and stupid unless they can choose to be left-handed as part of their character concept. And yeah, there's a point at which the designers have to delicately tell the customer, "Uh, no, this is what you're getting. You want to complain about it, fine. You want to never buy another one of our products because you couldn't be left-handed? Fine. We will struggle to survive without your sinister presence."

But I'm not sure that "I wanted more than one romance per gender" is that point.

It's just disingenuous, this whole line of reasoning:

Anything worth doing is worth doing well, especially when it's something with so much emotional potential. But I certainly don't want to go the route of harem anime, which is total fantasy indulgence and gross pandering.

I don't think anybody was arguing for harem anime, at least not anyone taking part in the serious discussion. But in one cute little rhetorical swoop, wanting to have an actual adult relationship in the game has been equated with wanting a bevy of nubile pixelated nymphs to do your bidding.

As a player, I'm insulted, and it sounds like a designer making excuses by going on the attack.

As a designer, I'm disappointed, because Obsidian is the only other company out there making games like the ones I love, the ones I joined BioWare to make -- and hearing an Obsidian designer slam everybody else is sad.

I'm not slamming Obsidian as a whole -- heck, I'm enjoying the story of NWN2 right now -- but comments like that bum me out and tick me off.
 
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WOW, what a great post from an insider!! It's refreshing to hear your thoughts from the perspective of both designer and player. Simple choice is definitely not a point of separation between dev and player as you point out. All most of us asked for was a choice between 2 options, rather than just the one decreed from above. Can you imagine the impact if you'd romanced an NPC only to have them die as part of the plot??!! On second thoughts, the screams of outrage might be too much!! :)
 
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Sawyer's post really irked me, and I've been thinking about why.

You made a good post, there. I liked a lot of it. But you've pigeonholed Josh, especially in light of the revelation that he's going to resurrect BH as a free module. Case in point, let's look at another quote.


In a product that everyone paid $60 Canadian to buy, "You are a stupid immature person for wanting that" is a line of argument you want to use carefully.
How do you know that he's referring to a $60 product? In fact, in that thread he says, "writing as I see fit isn't likely to be popular, so I don't do it anymore." It seems like an acknowledgement that how he wants things to be is different from how his corporate taskmasters want things to be, and he keeps them separate.


I don't think anybody was arguing for harem anime, at least not anyone taking part in the serious discussion. But in one cute little rhetorical swoop, wanting to have an actual adult relationship in the game has been equated with wanting a bevy of nubile pixelated nymphs to do your bidding.
But that's not what he did. He took a shot at sloppy shallow romances. That doesn't mean he's taking a shot at "an actual adult relationship." In fact, it looks like that's what he's arguing for. Perhaps you two are not as far apart as you think?
 
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In my opinion, we should seperate romances and admirers.

On one hand, you have romances like the ones you can have with Jaheria, Viconia and so on. For such a romance in an RPG to mean something as a gameplay element, it must be done properly, otherwise they can just have a brothel option like Gothic 2 did.

On the other hand, a hero in a fantasy universe is like a rock star today, and they litteraly get panties tossed at them. If anything, having admirers might increase realism and feeling of being a hero, instead of having to work your butt off to get a girl - great heroes don't work hard to get girls (James Bond, anyone?)

Ego-stroking will always have a high focus in tales of great heroes. There's just no way around that - realistically, the hero would get butchered when badly outnumbered. There is no such thing as a one man army. Leaders can make a difference, as inspiration and in terms of tactics, but they can't kill hundreds on their own.

There's nothing wrong with such ego-stroking in games. A one man army, if he existed, would not find it hard to get laid. What I feel Sawyer fails to point out is the fact that you can have sex in a game without it being a romance. A proper romance requires a bit of depth and good writing. Some admirer wanting to sleep with the great hero doesn't qualify as a "romance" to me.

I don't see the problem in having either, or both, in a game, as long as we use the proper terms.
 
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You made a good post, there. I liked a lot of it. But you've pigeonholed Josh, especially in light of the revelation that he's going to resurrect BH as a free module.

I may have pigeonholed Josh -- I'm open to debate on that. Let's keep BH out of it, though.

How do you know that he's referring to a $60 product? In fact, in that thread he says, "writing as I see fit isn't likely to be popular, so I don't do it anymore." It seems like an acknowledgement that how he wants things to be is different from how his corporate taskmasters want things to be, and he keeps them separate.

Well, I know he's referring to a $60 product because that's how much NWN2 costs up in my neck of the woods, and the entire initial complaint was about the paucity of romances in NWN2. When he says that gamers are too caught up in the idea of "winning", he makes specific reference to two characters that people thought should have romances but instead have dead-end character paths that people think were once supposed to be romances. So... he's not talking about a free module he's making. He's defending his game (which is good), and he's doing so by saying that the gamers just aren't mature enough to appreciate the depth of his story (which is less good).

But that's not what he did. He took a shot at sloppy shallow romances. That doesn't mean he's taking a shot at "an actual adult relationship." In fact, it looks like that's what he's arguing for. Perhaps you two are not as far apart as you think?

It's very possible. To me, that post read like he was taking a shot at all romances except the ones he wrote. Since I haven't written anything that's seen the light of day, I'm not personally offended, but as somebody who "won" the romance with Jaheira and then later "won" the romance with Carth, I didn't see them as shallow ego-pandering. I got to be heroic and cool, yeah, but nobody was swooning at my feet. Heck, in Jade, you could have a threesome with Dawn Star and Silk Fox, and I thought that even that stayed on the right side of the line (although I personally would never leave my sweetie Dawn Star, even to part-time it with that crazy princess).

He didn't say "There are some great ones out there, and those are the ones I'd like to see emulated." He said "romances need more work (done well) or less work (not done)". That's an empty-calorie statement unless you actually start talking about specifics.

It's like if I said, "I think that it's possible to have a good story set in the Forgotten Realms, but a lot of today's Forgotten Realms CRPG stories end up being racist. I don't like writing racist games, which is why I'm not into writing anymore. I'd like to see the racism in the Forgotten Realms handled with more nuance, or not at all."

Yeah, I haven't slammed any one game, and I've left myself the wiggle room with "a lot of" so that if somebody defends a specific game, I can make a vague, "Oh, I wasn't talking about any game in particular, I was just making an observation" defense. It's being vague in order to get away with an insult that the insultee can't possibly miss.

Honestly, while his post did irk me, I can acknowledge that he's probably just trying to pick his words carefully. It's easier to talk about gamers being too concerned with winning and developers wanting to make deeper and more complex stories (which no gamer can argue against without sounding like a loser) than it is to say, "You know, Wizards gutted the romances. Said that what we were doing might confuse players who'd signed up for monster-whacking, said that it was too complex for the target audience. So we're left with two months until ship and no romances, and we pretty much had to pick our battles and settle for one romance option per gender -- the safe one that we'd put in just in case Wizards did exactly what they ended up doing, gutting the romances. We fixed what we could on the timeline we had, and we wrote some really abridged stuff for the NPCs who used to be romanceable to fill in the gaps."

(That's all hypothetical. I don't know that that ever happened on a BioWare game, and I have no idea what happened on Obsidian's NWN2. But I do know that in NWN1, Wizards wanted a game that teenagers would be comfortable playing, and that would have little to no risk of sparking controversy for sexual content, especially given its multiplayer and modding capability. Hence, no kissing animation out of the box, and no real romances until Hordes, which even then were almost entirely platonic. Nice, but platonic. As a designer, I wished BioWare had had the chance to write more grown-up romances. As a designer as well, though, I can understand and respect Wizards' position, because the people who make kids' games certainly don't want a Hot Coffee deal going on, even with mods.)
 
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Yes, Patrick, but has Wizards missed its true audience? I don't think the teenies buy/play NWN in large numbers. They prefer GTA and similar games, many of which are not T rated!! The audience for NWN games, is (I think, but don't have the stats to support it) the older game players who enjoy the depth a good RPG should have. Sure some teens do play it, but if you use a site like this as a reasonable cross-section, you won't find it filled with teenies. Most of us are MUCH older!! :)
 
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Heh. That's a much different argument. For my money, the short version is:

1) You're right.
2) Wizards wishes that you weren't, and is trying to make it so that you're not.
3) The connection between NWN and pen & paper D&D made it more important for NWN to be younger-gamer-friendly, so that there'd be no situation in which a pen & paper player was put off of NWN because of the story. (If they're put off by the rules incorporation, that's a different problem, of course.) :)
 
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Hahaha, how true!! Tough luck for Wizards and Hasbro, but they need to get a reality check!! My teenage son wouldn't touch a 'Teen' game with a 10 foot barge pole!! :)
 
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"It's refreshing to hear your thoughts from the perspective of both designer and player."

Yes, nice to see PatrickWeekes, posting. :)

"But you've pigeonholed Josh, especially in light of the revelation that he's going to resurrect BH as a free module."

I don't see it that way at all, we are all talking specificly about his comments reguarding Romances.
Everyone has bad days, makes dumb comments but doesn't mean we should discuss them or that we are attacking him personally, this is about his incorrect views or poorly worded intentional thoughts on Romance in games. ;)

"How do you know that he's referring to a $60 product?"

He was talking about NWN2, afaik and not sure about the dollar conversion but in the US it was released at $50 to $65 counting the CE, iirc.

"But that's not what he did."

Yes it is becuase used the excuse of "Ego Rubbing" which while not being 100% of what games are about it currectly is a huge part, not only that its a big part of all the entertainment business, which can be done well or not.

The the moral of this story is don't kick other Devs and gamers in the kneecaps when your having a bad day as a game designer, cause we bite back. :p
 
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