You might’ve noticed at this point that I like to play video games and I’ve a particular interest in RPGs. I’ve mentioned before how I’ve played Skyrim and went on to get 100% of all of the achievements within the game. One of the first achievements I took note of was to marry a character and as I explored the world and completed quests, I came across Aela the Huntress. I instantly liked her personality and decided that I would marry her. I built a house in Falkreath and proposed to her. We got married and as we began to live together, I quickly realised that any personality that I had been attracted to had been purged from her. While I still found some enjoyment in the relationship, I could remember feeling quite disappointed from the experience and this made me begin to think about the surprising difficulty of portraying romance in video games.
I should probably clarify that I’m predominantly going to be discussing romance in video games in which you make an active choice to pursue a particular character rather than ones where a romance is fixed. While fixed romance in games can come with their own share of problems, I would rather talk about the issues associated with romance where the player makes an active choice and the limitations that video games can struggle with when it comes to portraying this.
Returning to Skyrim, I believe one of the biggest problems is the sheer number of romanceable characters. Video game development is usually quite expensive and work-intensive and Skyrim features more than fifty characters that you can potentially romance. In an ideal world, every character who could be romanced would have a very well developed and distinct personality within a romantic relationship. Instead, pretty much all of the characters end up becoming non-distinct and bland with little to no personality and I can only imagine that this is so that it can work with multiple characters. However, this ends up taking away from the relationship as the person you marry is condemned to lose any distinguishing characteristics that drew you to them in the first place.
Another excellent example of this would be farming sim mega-hit Stardew Valley. In that game, you have twelve possible marriage candidates but an early issue was that marrying any of them would cause them to become a soulless non-entity (figuratively) that lived within your house. Luckily it seemed that the developer recognised this issue and decided to improve the marriage system by providing unique dialogue, a hobby area where your spouse continues their hobby from before they met your character and, later on, unique marriage events that can be triggered between you and your spouse but it took years of post-game development in order to fix this issue.
It seems to me that it’s a case that character romances in games should be very much about quality over quantity. I mentioned recently that I’ve been playing some Dragon Age games and in Dragon Age: Origins you only have four possible romance options. When I played Dragon Age: Origins, I ended up in a relationship with a character called Alistair and while the romance did have its issues, such as the fact that I could give him an exorbitant amount of gifts and that I had to be the proactive one in the relationship, I was actually quite surprised at the direction that the relationship went near the end of the game and, overall, was quite pleased with how the romance ended up developing.
Romance is a very important aspect of real world life and it makes sense that video games, in their effort to create worlds and characters, should attempt to recreate this. However, it is clear that many video games struggle with these relationships and it’s important that we try to understand what makes romance work and not work in various games. Clearly it is of vital importance that marriage and romance with a character should not change their personality into a one size fits all.
Let me know your thoughts on the surprising difficulty of portraying romance in video games, which romances in video games have stood out to you as being particularly good or bad, how you think romance in video games can be improved in general and any additional information you might have on the topic.
Thanks for reading and if you wish to seek any of the titles I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs! Also feel free to follow my curator page on Steam “JRPG Reviews” for thoughts and opinions on any JRPGs that I play and my YouTube channel “Victory Achieved Gaming” where I guide my friend through challenging games.