To Make Life Mine

"Someone hold me
(Tell me I'm pretty)
Someone hold me
(Tell me you need me)
Someone talk to me
(I hate feeling lonely)
Someone, anyone,
Rescue me, set me free

It's all bullshit anyway,
I cannot be what you say"

My Black Heart Machine - It Beats Like This



I've done a lot of bitching about Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire over the past year, pissed off at seeing what should have become the new reference point for cRPG series get turned over to a writing team of self-righteous incompetents. It resulted in a betrayal of the first game's setting, a self-indulgent fanfic filled with repetitive bigotry.

It also brought back what should be an obsolete tradition in cRPGs, NPC romances. Starting with Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate 2, the Black Isle / Bioware / Obsidian genealogy of party-based tabletop-inspired cRPGs have usually allowed you to cozy up for some corollary campaign canoodling and hump your hired help. The newer revival of such story-based campaigns (InXile's Torment: Tides of Numenera, Obsidian's own excellent work Tyranny and the original PoE) have thankfully tended to do away with such nonsense. Its return in PoE 2 was both badly written and noticeably intrusive.

It didn't help that two of the adventurers-with-benefits options, Tekehu and Xoti, were the only main healers in the default companion roster (chanters notwithstanding) which almost ensures you'll drag at least one of them along on a first playthrough. Both were designed as romantic from the ground up and their role as such is pushed on you, quite incongruously, right from the start. Tekehu's the lowest sort of romance novel detritus, a mystical prince with a-may-zing hair, meeesteeerious origins and great expectations, who nonetheless needs emotional manipulation to achieve his full potential. Everything he does is in the name of his divine mother (seriously, his battle cry is "be- HOLD ME, MOTHER!") except the madcap partying, for which he's constantly ridiculed and condemned, needing to be tamed by the love of a good woman. In his very first dialogue, my character was falling into the tall handsome prince's dark shining eyes for no particular reason.

Xoti was, if anything, even worse. I can only assume it's what the writing team assumes (or wishes) would appeal to strong-minded men, a simpleminded, ignorant fanatic hillbilly given to swooning. I deliberately avoided the romantic dialogue options like hugging her close to you in a tender embrace when she's had a bad dream. Don't ask me where the hell that even came from in the absence of any previous sign of emotion. Nevertheless, the dialogues progressed on the assumption that you'd picked the option her writer wanted you to pick. Not to mention her slashfic-grade descriptions:
"The tip of her tongue, a peek of dusky rose, dabs at the corner of her mouth, leaving a glimmer of wetness."

Even avoiding most of her inane repartee and picking only the darker, less touchy-feely routes leads to this gem:

***
Me: "You're being called to a higher purpose, Xoti. Embrace the harvest - the darkness of the fall."
Her: "Suppose I am. Must be a reason Gaun's showing me these things." Absently, she thumbs the flat of her sickle. "Sometimes I hear them like a whisper in the back of my mind."
Nod "Me too."
She offers you a wry, knowing smile. "We'll figure this out together."
Carefully, she slips her hand into yours. Your fingers easily entwine, palms pressing together so tight you can feel your heartbeats between you.
Shoulders squared, she looks off into the distance.
***

No, seriously now, WHERE THE HELL DID THAT JUST COME FROM???
"Hey, boss?"
"Yes, underling to whom I've barely spoken three lines this whole time?"
"Ah bin fantasizin' on rippin' the souls outten ever-one in tha world."
*cue violins and rain of cherry blossoms*
!
...
... one cannot help but feel we skipped a few crucial turns in the conversation there.

Better yet, your only two available responses are:
"Is there anything we can do to alleviate your nightmares?"
and
[Say nothing] - which by the way leads to the same subsequent quest step of her unburdening her soul at a temple.
No, I'm sorry, that bombshell of turning into a mass-murdering soul collectrix needs a third reply option:
"Bitch, you cray-cray!"

Ah, but that's in keeping with the usual cheese and crackers invited by romantic interludes. To date the only such character self-possessed and complex enough that I would consider her worthy of attention is Morrigan from DA:O.
At least Annah's one passionate kiss from Planescape: Torment was a very brief interlude.
When bandits held a crossbow to Jaheira's head in BG2 I just attacked and let them shoot her. I'm a cloth-clad mage and she's my team's tank, it's her damn job. Turns out making the tactically sound choice as party leader was the wrong answer. Oops.
I sure as hell wasn't about to start anything with that grand ham from NWN, Aribeth.
Elanee from NWN2 seemed intriguing for a few lines, but she got very needy and whiny very fast.
And so on. Safiya from Mask of the Betrayer was more promising but still fell short.

No matter the game, playing at romantic favor-currying brings the inevitable realization that this has nothing to do with anything. (Another reason Morrigan stood out: her agenda was actually contextualized.) It adds nothing to the game universe's immersiveness and as far as character development yields outright cognitive dissonance. No, I don't think my character, the diamond mind standing as the multiverse's only bulwark against the all consuming shadow (there's always an all-consuming shadow) should spend half his time genuflecting before and applauding some codependent belle's one-woman play about her oh-so-gooey fee-fees.

Even on the rare occasion when they're handled with passable skill, cRPG romances sap development time and funding. Minigames in general tend to do so (gambling minigames are a classic example) but at least most can be integrated into gameplay (Elder Scrolls lockpicking for instance) and this is simply not the case  with romances. While it's safe to assume the greater world around your adventure incorporates plenty of emotional manipulation, codependency and mammalian pair-bonding (baby adventurers have to come from somewhere after all) this background assumption need not be spelled out.