Awful person demands No Homo mode in DA2, awful people on TTLG come out of woodwork - by june gloom
henke on 26/3/2011 at 12:59
Quote Posted by Avalon
I encourage a No Homo mode in Dragon Age 2, simply because of how easy it is to be gay in the game compared to being straight.
You give Anders or Fenris 3 or 4 heart responses and suddenly you're seeing all kinds of emotional love scenes.
Aaaaaand you know this
how? :sly:
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
christian morality simulator
Hahaha, "christian morality simulator" is the single greatest phrase in this thread. :D
Koki on 26/3/2011 at 13:29
Quote Posted by Ladron De La Noche
I'm at a loss really. What is the benefit of having homosexuality in video games?
Well I can beat that. What is the benefit of having romance in video games in the first place?
You can count the amount of games in which you actually start
giving a damn about the characters on one hand, and they're trying to introduce an element light years ahead of "giving a damn". That's why romances in video games are embarassingly bad at best. I can imagine trying it out for the novelty's sake or because "it's possible and she's in my party anyway so whatever" but I find the notion that anyone could get even remotely involved in one laughable.
Unless, of course, the romance itself can give you a tangible bonus within the game; then it's a completely different story. That's why King's Bounty: The Legend had the best romance ever in a videogame. Find girl, marry girl, fuck yeah four more equipment slots!
Zerker on 26/3/2011 at 16:36
Personally, I find the romance options in most Bioware games to be awkward. I usually end up with the "friendship but no further" choice if possible.
I do have a question about Dragon Age 2 though: there is apparently two main development paths for characters (friend vs rival). Does that mean that there are really three paths for romanceable characters (friend vs lover vs rival), or is friend considered the same as lover? I am confused. It's easier in other Bioware games when there is no gameplay effect...
Dresden on 26/3/2011 at 16:57
Quote:
You give Anders or Fenris 3 or 4 heart responses and suddenly you're seeing all kinds of emotional love scenes. On the other hand, to get with the girls, you have to hound them for half the game to even notice your flirtation.
To be fair, it pretty much works that way in the real world too.
EvaUnit02 on 26/3/2011 at 17:06
Here's the bottom-line, DA2 is a rushed game and one of the consequences is having far less dialogue+plot branches. The party characters being bisexual is largely a result of them being lazy and just copy-pasting dialogues. Little to no distinction is made of the player character's gender.
Eg At times Hawke has prejudice to Mages, even when you're playing as a fucking Mage class character.
Quote Posted by Koki
Unless, of course, the romance itself can give you a tangible bonus within the game;
I'd imagine that a lot of people would pursue the romances just to unlock achievements.
Jason Moyer on 26/3/2011 at 21:47
Quote Posted by Koki
Well I can beat that. What is the benefit of having romance in video games in the first place?
I don't have a problem with sexual relationships in CRPG's because I think a well-done game (in the style of Black Isle/Troika/Obsidian) can treat those relationships with the same level of complexity and unpredictability as any personal relationship between the PC and NPC's.
I don't particularly approve of the way they're handled in Bioware games, but I think that's more to do with the way Bioware handles character interaction more than the fact that romance options are present. Bioware basically uses everything that's bad about CRPG interactions - dialog loops, choices with obvious affects, and linear NPC relationships based on hitting the same button over and over (i.e. the "be nice to me 8 times and I'll let you plug my manhole").
I seriously wonder if anyone at Bioware has social skills based on the way their characters interact with each other. People don't trust you or like you when you're unerringly nice to them all the goddamn time (and people react differently and to differing degrees to what in a standard alignment system would be considered pure good/nice or pure evil/snarky). Dialog loops suck because they let you repeat the same choices over and over with no consequences, when a conversation should be a once and done thing.
I know you dismissed the game before it even came out, Koki, but you should really try to ignore the gameplay (assuming you'd hate it) in Alpha Protocol and give it a go purely for the conversations. It is the only game I've ever played that avoids every obvious pitfall in branching dialog: people don't react positively to the same types of comments and most characters won't become completely friendly if you railroad the same tone over and over and each conversation is a once and done affair without the ability to keep going back and asking the same shit over and over or being able to go back and initiate the same dialog to take a different choice. I'm not a fan of the dialog wheel, but the overall way interaction was handled in that game should be, at a minimum, the standard we expect from NPC interaction in videogames now.
june gloom on 26/3/2011 at 21:58
Alpha Protocol's dialogue system sucks balls, though, because A) you're on a timer and B) you have no idea what you're going to say, the dialogue choices are simply labeled stuff like suave (which comes off really creepy a lot) and professional.
Jason Moyer on 26/3/2011 at 22:28
Right, I don't really like the vague dialog wheel thing. I like the timer though, it gives urgency to a genre that typically has none whatsoever. I wish that people hadn't taken the complaints about the time limit in Fallout and decided that urgency was a bad thing in an RPG. One of my favorite gaming moments was the first time I played FO and didn't know there was supposed to be a ghoul settlement at Necropolis because they were all dead by the time I got there, for reasons I was too late to find out.
demagogue on 27/3/2011 at 01:03
This guy is trying to fight two practically inescapable axioms of the state of fantasy RPGs today: (1) they are chained to their genre tropes more than any other genre (or are at the top of the list anyway); and (2) one of those tropes, inherited from jRPGs, is a baseline sexuality of androgynous & bi-curious, and then playing with that with mixed gender love-polygons (basically every NPC at some point wants to sleep with the avatar if not each other). You may as well be surprised there are elves as surprised there's that. As it is, the effeminate male elves want to sleep with you too.
