13 réponses à ce sujet

[Maclimes]

I know a lot of people were upset with the "Everyone is Bi" aspect of Dragon Age 2, because it seemed un-realistic. Real people have preferences, and depth to their personal decisions.

The problem is that simply making them straight/gay/bi doesn't actually address that issue. It just addresses one minor aspect of a person's preference. People actually have far more complex reasons for romance other than the set of genitalia they possess.

*****

Perhaps Fenris only like non-mages, regardless of other factors.

Perhaps Leliana only likes people who are loyal Andrastians, regardless of race or gender.

Perhaps Anders only likes light-skinned characters, regardless of gender or race.

Perhaps Alistair only likes human females who are loyal Andrastians.

Perhaps Cullen only likes blondes who are proficient warriors, no rogues or mages.

Perhaps Sigrun only likes dwarf warrior males named Maclimes because she's mine and you can't have her.

******

What I'm saying is, drawing the line at gender preference is arbitrary and self-serving. It's better to just go with the "Everyone is hero-sexual", and give people options. The alternative is just over-simplification.

[Allan Schumacher]

EpicBoot2daFace wrote...

plnero wrote...

I don't mind men hitting on me; I can't help it if they're attracted to my good looks and colorful personality. I just don't want them to get pissed at me when I tell them I prefer the ladies.

That was another problem I had with DA2. You turn down someone you aren't interested in and you receive rivalry points. Why should I be punished for not pursuing a gay romance? The same could be said for people who do role play a gay character. They are punished for turning down a member of the opposite sex.

First rivalry is not a punishment. it is just a reaction. Second it required a particular type of playthrough to even achieve the rivalry response.

[Allan Schumacher]

I think want most people really want is just a neutral way to respond IE "Anders i think you are a very nice person but i'm just not into you" would have been 100% better then "I don't want you thinking that way" which made me want to slap my Hawke.

This is a reasonable request, in terms of wanting increased level of player agency.

Although I have no beef with Anders still taking this the wrong way and feeling rejected. Frankly to me it makes sense that sometimes characters would take innocuous things poorly. Plenty of opportunity to still become friends and see this as nothing more than a speedbump along the way.

[Allan Schumacher]

All of the characters have very... strong personality traits. They don't seem to have any average, normal traits at all really.

I find this to be pretty common for NPC companions in RPGs.  Do you think it'd be possible to do a similar breakdown of DAO's NPCs?

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 31 octobre 2012 - 07:49 .

[David Gaider]

MrCousland99 wrote...
No, on the Talk To Anders quest I was  just being friendly then all of a sudden he started hitting on me and I say I am not into men BOOM 10 rivalry if it wasn't for the wiki I wouldn't have found out how to get approval in that quest...BY FLIRTING WITH HIM, so yeah you are punished for having a sexual preference <_<

No, you are not.

Rivalry is not a punishment. It is not "he hates you" as in DAO, meaning you will never get any gameplay benefits or dialogue-- it just changes the aspect of the relationship. That's it. The only "punishment" here is you deciding that Friendship is the only viable path... or being concerned that 10 points of Rivalry is somehow a terrible thing, considering you can make that up and far more before Act 1 is even through.

Should that dialogue have had a more "neutral" way of turning Anders down? Sure. Having looked at the line in question, I don't find it so blisteringly terrible as some have painted it, but whatever. I can see what people are getting at. Personally, I just wish people would stop using it as an excuse when what they're usually talking about is something else.

Modifié par David Gaider, 01 novembre 2012 - 03:25 .

[David Gaider]

The Ethereal Writer Redux wrote...
assuming F/R remains for DA3, which seems likely

It won't, or not quite. Mechanically it'll work the same, but it won't exist as a gating mechanism for interactions and gaining/losing it will be done in the manner of DAO's approval rather than being tied (mostly) to a single character issue.

[Allan Schumacher]

I find it curious that Bioware doesn't know what's going on in their own games.

I do know what's going on in the game. Anders responds with +10 Rivalry points during that conversation if the player has historically taken diplomatic responses to Anders.

I also fully understand that, if the player's goal is to maximize Anders' friendship score, that this penalty is wholly insignificant in that it barely even measures as a blip.

I find it curious that people criticize us for having an NPC behave in a certain way in response to a player action and somehow taking offense to the idea that Anders didn't take it personally, all the while it ultimately has no significant bearing on whether or not you can become friends with Anders.

[David Gaider]

Palipride47 wrote...
The debate on the bi aspect sometimes relates to "realism" and the people who argue against "bisexual" characters for "realism" do so under the justification that they know how bisexuality/ human nature in general works.

It's not realism, however. It's meta-gaming. They know how the character would react differently if their PC was a different gender, so try to apply that as working the same for all versions of the character... making the romances all objectively bisexual.

Which, even if that were true, I'm not certain what the big deal is. So what if they are all essentially bisexual? So what? Are we really going to try to apply statistical analysis to a group of oddballs and outcasts who already special in an alarming variety of ways from just about everyone else you meet? Truth is, many of the people objecting are really objecting to the idea of bisexuality itself as being "weird", like it's a non-choice and indicative of indecisiveness and not really a character trait at all... so thus best made rare (and confined solely to hot women, if I get the gist of most of the commentary, presumably because two women making out is always cool so long as there's at least one man watching) if it's present at all.

At best I can agree with the idea of the whole notion of subjective sexuality (subjective in the larger sense, since really only Isabela and, to a lesser degree, Anders even discuss their sexuality) being less than ideal from a holistic viewpoint. Some people want the characters to discuss their sexuality more, or just like the idea of characters having a more set sexuality in all instances (ignoring the idea that bisexuality itself is "too rare to be realistic"). As I've said before, given enough resources I'd happily do a broader array of romances with different sexualities as ME3 did. We may even do that-- I've not really said what the DA3 plan is. Regardless, if that's not the case then fairness and fun gameplay win out over meta-gaming preferences. Hands down.

And sometimes it is just plain old homophobia.

Not always, but yes-- sometimes it really is. Dressed up as other arguments, and wearing those arguments like an ill-fitting muumuu, but I guess nobody likes to admit they have terrible fashion sense. That would be gauche.

Modifié par David Gaider, 01 novembre 2012 - 03:56 .

[David Gaider]

Maria Caliban wrote...
Will you have a selection of companion specific quests like in DA 2? I really liked them, though I think the shifting of dialogue from general conversations to quests might have thrown some people.

I don't think we'll have as many companion quests as we did in DA2, no. On the whole I thought the companion quests worked far better as character development than just talking to a follower back in their base, but it seems some people really missed that and I can see a certain loss in agency so we're likely to move a lot of that content back into their personal interactions.

I know some people will ask "why can't you do both?" ... to which my response would be "because this isn't Talking To Followers: The Game", despite how much some people seem to think that's what it should be.

[David Gaider]

Foolsfolly wrote...
Loss of agency? Isn't talking through an issue and undertaking a mission to resolve that issue still resolving the issue? Just with punches? Especially if they still have "Resolve the issue or ignore the issue" types of choices.

No, I think the issue is basically that people treat the companion quests as just "quests"... the same as any other quest you get, and not really having anything to do with getting to know the follower. Or, more significantly, they see the lack of the many questions you could ask in DAO and say "I didn't get to talk to my follower". Some even take it to "I didn't get to know my follower", even though you have three major quests you most certainly didn't get in DAO (and I thought those were far better ways to get to know a character than just asking them questions, and a way of providing them an arc throughout the plot).

So I would ultimately disregard all of that were it not for the agency issue... meaning that people receive quests, including the follower quests. They never arise as a result of your direction. So that, combined with the fact that you were also informed whenever followers had something new to say, meant that many players felt that they didn't have a great deal of involvement in the relationship... it was the follower directing everything. That's not quite correct, but it's a perception that likely informed some of the other comments I noted in the last paragraph. Those people are trying to describe what's lacking, and while I don't think they're hitting the mark it's not because nothing was lacking. Therefore some juggling of the resource allocation is justified, even if I'll miss having all the companion quests.

And all that is really off topic for this thread, so I'll leave this particular discussion at that.

Modifié par David Gaider, 01 novembre 2012 - 04:26 .

[David Gaider]

Vandicus wrote...
I haven't read the whole thread or all of what's being talked about at the moment, but assuming you had significantly more resources Mr. Gaider, would the kind of enhanced selectivity such as mentioned in the OP be a thing you'd consider?

Provided every character in the party could be a romance? Sure. The problem with that being that it's never going to happen... and, even then, I'd have an issue with having every character be available for romance even if it's only be certain types of characters. Making a character romanceable means they can't be inherently un-romanceable, and that's a bit limiting from a storytelling perspective if I don't have that option.

[David Gaider]

Poison_Berrie wrote...
Question: Why couldn't romances form outside of the party?

Technically they can. The problem there is a tough one to tackle, however. The amount of dialogue which is distinct to the romance is actually fairly small... there's a lot of conversation which a player has with a follower outside of romance-specific stuff (just "building the relationship"), often with just some variant lines to give such dialogues some different flavor. This allows them to serve more than one purpose (which is important, lest not romancing a character means barely having interactions with them at all).

Thus the line between what is the romance and what isn't are blurred, from the player perspective... indeed, a great deal of the relationship that you build with a follower stems from the time you spend adventuring with them. Is it part of the romance? No, of course not... but in your head it's an accumulation of time and experience. You're building a head canon of the time you've spent with the character.

Now take a character outside of the party. There's no time spent adventuring with them. Unless there are many other dialogues which would have occurred with that character anyhow, this means that any and all romance interactions would have to written specifically for that character... making them more expensive. Since you're not "spending time" in that character's company, the entirety of your relationship thus consists of you talking to them... and, from the player's perspective, those will always seem to be precious few. We can't possibly give such a romance the same depth. So, unless people are okay with such romances being comparitively paper-thin to follower romances, it cannot work the same way. Not, like I said, unless this is a character you are already otherwise interacting with a great deal.

Unless, by romances, we are referring to the kind of paper-thin romances one finds in the Witcher or Skyrim. If so, then sure. But I assume what's being requested are romances that are comparable to the ones you'd have with party members.

Modifié par David Gaider, 01 novembre 2012 - 02:46 .

[David Gaider]

hoorayforicecream wrote...
The Mass Effect crew is a pretty decent example of this. Neither Traynor, Cortez, nor Chambers are ever squadmates in Mass Effect, but they can still have romance content because of how much time Shep spends on the Normandy interacting with them normally.

I would point out that there are indeed people who claim that Traynor and Cortez were not "equal" romances for the very reasons I described-- despite having the same number of conversations, the perception of the overall interaction was not equal. But, yes, aside from that those are good examples of the way a non-party romance could work.

[David Gaider]

hoorayforicecream wrote...
It's almost always going to be lopsided in favor of companions though, isn't it? Unless you specifically compensate by writing significantly *more* content for the non-follower romance, it's just going to favor the follower.

Correct. Having it be a non-party character who you already have lots of dialogue with evens it up a bit... but chances are very slim that there are any characters with a volume of dialogue that approaches your party members. Thus, yes, it will either be lopsided or you would have to write far more dialogue for those non-party characters to compensate. Since that isn't likely to ever happen, non-party romances will always be inherently lopsided... it's simply a question of how lopsided they would be.