Building a better video game romance

Ever since Baldur's Gate 2 introduced players to the charms of Aerie, Jaheira, Viconia, and Anomen, romances have generated more discussion than just about any other feature I can think of. It's almost gotten to the point where the subject deserves its own Bioware forum, where players can knock themselves out speculating about who's romanceable, sharing tips on how to get the "best" results, and generally engaging in a lot of fantasy kissing-and-telling.

I, of course, am above all that. Sure, I have romanced all the female love interests in every Bioware game I've ever played, but that was just for the sake of cultural awareness, scholarly interest - you know, that sort of thing. Moving on...

One of the most interesting things about romances is the very fact that people find them so interesting. The knee-jerk reaction to this is that people who enjoy RPG romances are either sex-starved nerds clutching their 20-sided dice, or female. However, it's become increasingly obvious that not all RPG romantics can be pigeonholed that way.

Alistair

For me, the inclusion of romances in RPGs seems natural. RPGs are supposed to offer the opportunity to live a different life - why shouldn't that include one of the things that makes life worth living? In fact, you could argue that a game like Dragon Age - with all its romantic content - doesn't go far enough. If it truly and accurately modeled human needs and desires, we'd be spending a lot more of our time working on our relationships with Morrigan or Alistair, and a lot less time working on our Herbalism skills.

But I'm not advocating for that, exactly. Rather, I'm advocating for better romances. Because as interesting as they already are, there's certainly room for improvement.

Level scaling and the Uber Mountain Lion of Doom

There's good news and bad news for crotchety old-school gamers like me. The bad news (I always start with the bad news) is that Skyrim, the next installment in the Elder Scrolls series, will include that detestable design element known as level-scaling. The good news, recently relayed by a Bethesda community rep, is that the level scaling will be "similar to Fallout 3's, not Oblivion's."


I don't actually know what that means, because I've never played Fallout 3. However, Oblivion's level-scaling is about as bad as it gets, so I welcome any change to the system.

But wait, perhaps not everyone knows what I mean when I say "level-scaling." In a few words, it means that your enemies level up with you. Game developers use it to make sure combat remains challenging no matter where the PC goes. This is particularly desirable in sandbox RPGs like Oblivion, where the PC can choose to wander anywhere at any time.

In older games like Baldur's Gate, if you wandered into an area too dangerous for your level, you often found yourself facing a reload screen before you knew what hit you (Enter really old-school gamer: "Reload screens! We didn't have any of your dag-blame reload screens! We had to save our progress to floppy disk! *cough* *wheeze*"). At some point, somebody decided this was a problem, so developers came up with the most straightforward (read: lazy) solution: spawn enemies that are always appropriate for the player's level.

Oblivion demonstrated everything that can go wrong with level-scaling. Bandits decked out in Daedric armor roamed the countryside. Mountain lions capable of ripping a demigod to pieces lurked in the wilderness. Yes, it was a tad unrealistic. But perhaps more importantly, because of the way the leveling system worked, it was possible to actually get weaker (relative to the rest of the world) as you leveled up.

I'll continue to shake my fist at level-scaling as long as I draw breath. I much prefer a game in which I have the freedom to get in over my head, get my arse handed to me on a platter, then go back later to take revenge the monsters that once owned me. But (dagnabbit) level-scaling is pretty much a given in games today, so perhaps the best we can hope for is that developers become more sophisticated in how they implement it. Here are a few suggestions:

Emergence

Right then.

My geek love for the New Yorker and my geek love for video games recently converged under the title Master of Play, an article about legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Super Mario Bros. and many other classics.

Well, to be completely accurate, I’m not a video game geek per se. I’m more of a fantasy/modding/computer roleplaying game geek. Still, the article was fascinating as a portrait of a seminal figure in video games, and more importantly, contained a satisfying amount of general game design discussion. If you haven’t done so, you should read the whole thing online. I found this description of Super Mario Bros. particularly interesting:

The game had just fifteen or twenty dynamics in it—how the mushrooms work, how the blocks react when you hit them—yet they combined in such a way to produce a seemingly limitless array of experiences and moves, and to provide opportunities for an alternative, idiosyncratic style of play, which brings to mind nothing so much as chess. Will Wright cited the theory of emergence—the idea that complex systems arise out of the interaction of several simple things.

This, I would argue, doesn’t describe most RPGs.