I personally think the game would be better off without them to be honest.
Back when I was playing BG2, for some reason the romance with Jaheira always got bugged - it bothered me enough that I downloaded a walkthrough guide to the whole romance to try and pinpoint where the dialogue broke. When I printed off the guide all those years ago, it came to 45 pages of dialogue, so I've kept hold of it all these years in the original game box and out of interest looked at it now.
At a glance, the Jaheira romance in BG2 (this isn't including the expansion Throne of Bhaal btw) has approximately 40-45 seperate dialogue events, including a number of specific quests relating to Jaheira - the majority of these conversations all involve relating to her character in some way with very little flirtation. For most of these dialogues, there is the possibility of choosing wrong dialogue choices which either set back or break the possibility of romance altogether. As in ME games, only towards the end could your character 'sleep' with her. All in all it's the best character writing ever presented in a videogame - the whole thing had meaning, and was a great gaming experience.
Now compare that to ME1 and ME2 - in both games the 'love' interests have approximately 5 dialogue scenes each - I'll be honest with you, I've never fallen in love with someone in real life after five 2 minute conversations, so for me to call them 'love' interests or 'romance' options to start with is fairly laughable - call them scrog options if you want, but beyond that there's very little thought put into the LIs in these games as compared to the BG characters. AT the very least, in ME1, the conversations were closer to the sort you could have with BG2 characters - it was less forced flirtation and just talking about them / stuff. In ME2 it's literally a case of:
'Oh hey new person I've never met before, great b**bies by the way! Oh...after four more times of this, we're totally going to have sex!'
I literally don't understand how anyone can develop any sort of connection to these characters at all - it just seems to be purile nonsense aimed at making pre-pubescent teenage boys giggle, topped off with some cringeworthy cutscene - whatever happened to fade to black?!
So yeah, I'd much rather they didn't bother at all, and actually spent the time saved making the core story better instead.
Generally I've always disliked Bethesda after what they did with Oblivion and Fallout 3, but one thing they'll always have my respect for is the development mantra of saying - 'If you're going to put romance options in a game, either make sure you do them really well, or don't bother with them at all' - thus why those games don't have them.
Modifié par Faceman2006, 04 mars 2010 - 11:34 .
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