A romance story is good if’s not half-assed and a game doesn’t depend on it. 16-bit RPG’s did it well.
Been saying this for a long time now. Romance in video games is about as batshit-cringy as it gets and is a tremendous waste of time that could have been used to add meaningful content or fix stability issues/bugs instead.
It can be cute inold school adventure games tho
I as a video game enthusiast do not want my character to experience romance. It doesn’t happen in real life the way it is portrayed in media, and it’s fucking boring seeing it over and fucking over again. Gimme tragedy, gimme a problem I can solve, a mystery, or a war to fight. But romance, and sex, have not a damn place in those things. Developers of apparently every damn media have gotten it drilled into their heads that we want to read, watch, play thru, and otherwise experience their mental masturbation. Well I for one, don’t fucking want to experience it at all. Gimme a story, and if you can’t do it without pointless sex scenes then you don’t have a fuckin story, you have a story about fuckin.
Sometimes it’s fun
Well this is funny sex humor
Not romance
This is the same thing TV shows figured out ages ago: you give people a flirty relationship and it’s generally fun to watch. You turn that flirting into an actual relationship and it’s boring + usually some fan service where the authors of the show try to get their female coworkers as naked as they can be manipulated into getting. And then they always need to make that same female coworker get pregnant and force her to fake giving birth.
Tldr it doesn’t matter what the fans want, authors are fucking pervs.
1000% agree.
that’s only true because most of you motherfuckers do robotic gamified romances that don’t feel natural, heartfelt or interesting.
As usual big business trying to figure out a cookie cutter formula to repeatedly make billions in profit. But games are creative, not formulaic.
Yeah it’s too bad their formula isn’t “what if we made a good game?”
That’s not how senior management approvals work. You’re not allowed to pitch an opinion. Youre only allowed to make recommendations based on something that previously worked or if it’s a direct request by multiple users in an official feed back form. Why do you think there is no creativity in AAA games, they call it “data driven decision making”.
Now, I like a good romance here and there. Who doesn’t?
That being said, games like Sonic 06 are very good examples of why romance isn’t welcome in some places
Oh really. And what do you think he’s collecting all those rings for?
Sauron
Big mainstream games that are heavy on sex, like Baldur’s Gate 3, are a recent phenomenon.
Heavy on sex? Just which mods did the author install?
Actually. Sometimes it is. The actual problem is that you’re trying to figure it out at all. If you’re trying to engineer the perfect product, it will always be a shit game. Good games come from passionate developers who have an idea, not from board meetings and focus groups.
If they want sex they’ll go to pornhub
Some people prefer multiplayer games.
This feels like such a non issue because games and movies these days have basically zero sex appeal or romance
It was a pleasant surprise that you could romance people in BG3
And a major disappointment you couldn’t romance in Cyberpunk and the romance in Outer Worlds felt so half assed. Romance can be a great part of a game.
You can romance in Cyberpunk, but the romances have gender preferences. Judi and River will only romance women, Kerry and the other one I’ve never actually met will only romance men.
Really? Fair enough, I don’t recall there being any options to romance anyone when I played, but I must have just missed it. I remember the forced gay scene, which, like, fine, but I’m not gay, so it would have been cool to get at least one chance with a girl, lol, but it never seemed to come up no matter what I did with female companions in tow.
Panam is the other romancable character. If you do her entire side story (which is quite good) and choose the right options throughout, you’ll have the option to romance her near the end of the game. She’s only attracted to characters with a masculine body.
The romances in general are very easy to screw up. You lock yourself out of several right at character creation unfortunately. Here’s what you need for character creation to get each romance:
Judy: Feminine voice and body Kerry: Masculine voice and body River: Feminine body Panam: Masculine body
As long as you meet the requirements, you can romance 2 people in vanilla, though there’s something at the end of the game that requires you to pick one of them
You also need to do their side missions, but you meet each of them in the course of the main story. There’s also 4 romantic encounters that sadly don’t go anywhere serious.
You can get it on with Meredith Stout, the militech lady who threatens you near the start of the game. If you don’t insult her, you can get another mission from her in act 2. There’s also 3 encounters that can happen, but those are potential story spoilers
This came up, I want to say last year? In regards to movies and TV shows as well.
Aha - 2023:
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/25/1208435267/sex-teens-tv-movies
“Looking for ‘nomance’: Study finds teens want less sex in their TV and movies”
This is where I’ve found myself, too. It’s not that I am prudish or against the inclusion of sex scenes in shows and movies—I think some of them are pretty well done—but we’re at the point where it feels like a lot of media are just adding in sex scenes for the spectacle of it without it serving any particular purpose for narrative development or characterization.
I mean, the Marvel stuff has all been gigantic and proves you don’t need sex scenes. In fact, the one Marvel movie with a sex scene (Eternals) did the worst.
I don’t think the mere existence of a popular franchise (made primarily for kids at that) which happens to lack sex scenes is related to the trend being acknowledged here, though.
but we’re at the point where it feels like a lot of media are just adding in sex scenes for the spectacle of it without it serving any particular purpose for narrative development or characterization.
This has been a thing in movies since they existed. A bit less common, but still there, in books and TV. It isn’t anything new, but at least it is becoming less common.
That’s because OPs article is citing the second annual Teens and Screens report from the UCLA Center for Scholars and Storytellers. Your NPR article from 2023 is citing the first annual Teens and Screens report.
That makes sense then!
I really enjoyed my Shepard and Liara romance during the Mass Effect trilogy, but I don’t think it’s particularly well executed in most other games.
Have gamers ever wanted sex in games?
shifts eyes to 600gb on my external hdd
Haha yeah so right bro yeah haha
Turn off the nsfw filter on steam and find out.
Absolutely.
