Let's Speculate Romance, Or atleast how it will be presented

TransgenderVaultDeweller

"Fallout 4 adds to the lore"
As we all are aware of. In Skyrim, it was presented as ascertaining an amulet and wearing it infront of the would be person to marry. They accept unconditionally and a shallow weeding is commenced. Then we after a few seconds and it's over. The spouse just gives you money and adds no deep or romantically meaning to it. Making it pointless or filler content. Another example of poor writing.


Skipping a head. I honestly think they will try to emulate Bioware in their installment. But that it will still fall flat as they won't have solid reasons or it will be something really linear like just giving them a gift and them wanting to bang you. Nothing more, Nothing less. But i diegress.

What does the people of this glorious site have to say? Yeah, I'm aware of a companion romance thread. But this thread is sort of different. It's about how it will be presented.
 
The E3 demo showed that you will have a "wedding ring" in your inventory from the beginning. They will probably do it the same way, you find some "Wedding church of the Marriaging" and they tell you they can marry you, you wear the ring and your companions comment on it, so you get the A. Accept Weding B. Reject Wedding prompt and you engage in another shallow sequence, thy will probably move to your tree house and act as "merchants" and make you Fried Sugar Bombs ever 24 hours.
 
Yeah, romance in games is routinely terrible.

But at least you could wholly ignore it in Skyrim.

They might take the Bioware route circa Mass Effect 1 and 2 where just being nice to people made them fall hopelessly in love with you.

Sorry Thane, you're cool and all, but I ain't in the mood for frog's legs.
 
The Only romances in ME2 that weren't complete garbage where Garrus' and Jack, the Garrus' one because it was pretty casual and the Jack one because you could actually fuck it up if you tried to rush it.
 
I really doubt Fallout 4 has any romances that are in depth as Bioware's. I mean, Bioware's are fairly simple mechanically but they still are based on two things: regular and somewhat deep conversations with your companions and a lot of little choices you make regularly that your companions will approve or disapprove of.

There's no real way you can get any depth (least of all a deliberate "flirt" choice) out of the "what newspaper/not my business/hate newspapers/support news" dialogue wheel. I mean Bioware games regularly have six choices for dialogue and still ran into the "I thought I was being nice but then I ended up having gay sex with Anders" problem (even though there's a visible heart on the screen for the flirt option.)

I would imagine the romances in Fallout 4 will be kind of a combination of the Skyrim marriage mechanic and Veronica's "You Make Me Feel Like A Woman" quest. Specifically-
- You talk to someone and find out they like something or want to do something.
- You find one of those and you give it to them or you take them to do the thing, and you unlock new dialogue.
- Rinse, Repeat, Romance.
 
From waht we saw that "d'yu sportdenoooos" sequences it seems like you don't even need to do much before Piper throws inuendo your way. To be fair it's not the full sequence and it might bea ruse, but still.....
 
They put the heart on Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition precisely because they knew that people were having problems parsing out which dialogue options were what.

Which is precisely what happens when you cut dialogue options to non-reflective prompts.
 
THey keep cluttering the UIs senselessly when all they need to do is have a nice clean well designed list... Have any of them even read any Design books?
 
They put the heart on Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition precisely because they knew that people were having problems parsing out which dialogue options were what.

At least the images associated with various responses don't actually occupy any part of the screen that was being used for anything useful, since all of the options are at spokes you can put whatever you want in the center. Yet another reason a "choose your option with the left stick and confirm with a button press" is a much better system than Fallout 4's wheel.
 
I have never played any of the Fable games, how bad is it?

When you pause, the game goes to a loading screen, after the loading screen you're put into a magic room where to change your options or character, you have to physically move your character to one of several statues.

What should take a few seconds with a normal menu takes minutes in Fable 3.

And that's not even including the long nearly featureless hallway that is the level-up screen.
 
That sounds.... just fucking retarded.... What's wrong with a menu? You are already changing the settings why try to contextualize it instead of just make it Fast to use and clear to understand?
 
I have never played any of the Fable games, how bad is it?

I think it was Fable 2 that had you stand in front of the NPC and tell jokes, dance, or some other such nonsense and the NPC had a meter that indicated if their affection toward you was growing. It was lame, however once you married, you could sleep with your spouse and have children. Its been a while since I played it, but I think they might leave you eventually, and your child did age from a baby to a preteen child.

Honestly, given the complexity of a real courtship and romance, is there any game that could truly pull it off well?
 
That sounds.... just fucking retarded.... What's wrong with a menu? You are already changing the settings why try to contextualize it instead of just make it Fast to use and clear to understand?

Molyneux and his wacky ideas combined with nobody telling him it's a bad idea.

That's the majority problem with a lot of design problems.

People who have no idea about design stepping in and going "Hey, make it like this!"

Too much executive meddling and guys who think they know everything.
 
I mean, if they follow the same pattern as Fallout 3 and Skyrim, we're not going to get characters so much as vague caricatures.

I hate using Tv Tropes as a basis for any argument, but just look at the character pages for New Vegas compared to Fallout 3

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Characters/FalloutNewVegas

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Characters/Fallout3

New Vegas has characters that take pages to describe because they have nuance and depth.

Fallout 3 has characters that are summed up in two sentences.

It's like night and day.
 
Why do you hate using TV tropes as an example? I think it's a fine site. Of course it misses quite a lot of stuff, but it's interesting and useful, a good basis upon which you can elaborate. Though here there is no need for that, as everyone knows that F3 characters are shit, while FNV ones are good.
 
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