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Well here's a topic that gets beat like a dead whore, romance in RPGs. Though I'm surprised to hear that today's youth are getting sick of romance in games. I sure hope so, because the faggots screaming for it in every game was getting old a long time ago.

Apparently there's a big article about this topic, but in keeping with the male tradition of not reading, here's a short video talking about it instead.

Good to know CoG has been rejected by the youth.

I like having the option for romance in games where it makes sense. The entire theme of Persona games is about human relations, and not having romance in those games would be weird even if they're done in a very anime way, and BG3 just wouldn't be as good at recreating the DND table feel if people didn't have the option to be annoyingly horny. The real issue is that modern studios treat it as a must have while being really bad at writing romance into their games, and if I have to chose between no romance and bad romance I will chose no romance 10 times out of 10.

Yeah. For example, I hate romance how romance is treated in the newer Assassin's Creed games. Plenty of older AC titles didn't do it, or had it as part of the overall plot (Unity, for example.)

Nowadays, the games treat romances like dating sim side quests written by a teenager. 
 

Mass Effect... honestly my only issue with the romance subplots was how much Liara throws herself at you in the first game. It's like they were trying to pressure you into fucking her.

Demure, fuckable alien who also happens to be a virgin and is obsessed with you was the entirety of her character in the first game. I did appreciate the route they took with her becoming the new Shadow Broker in ME 2 and 3.

ME in general always felt bad at believably establishing relationships but once they were established it shined with paying them off in various ways.

Also I always felt that Tali's romance was very similar to Liara's in their fundamentals, but so much better executed simply because she was a proper character and there was a believable explanation behind her crush. I almost feel like it'd be better if she was romanceable in 1 instead of Liara.

Demure, fuckable alien who also happens to be a virgin and is obsessed with you was the entirety of her character in the first game.

And I thank whoever made her for it. Perfect female character. Hard to imagine it happening today.

There's dozens of characters like that in a new genre of AI generated sci-fi slop power fantasy stories you can find on youtube. Took me weeks to prune it from my feed, but I bet they're still being uploaded.

I'm not a coomer, I'm not gonna play/watch something just for the romance.

I want an actual good game, with the addition of a good romance.

There's romance in the AC games? Haven't played them since the second one, but I can't say I'm too surprised.

I've actually said before, romance in games don't bother me so much as is I feel it's a really horrible trend that BioWare spread to everyone. Which resulted in it getting shoved in to everything as a major selling point.

For example, for all the good I've heard about BG3, most of it is from folks going on about which character they want to fuck and how its great how everyone is seemingly horny. Didn't help matters that BG3 seemed make it a selling point pretty much shouting "HEY YOU CAN GET BUTTFUCKED BY A BEAR! GAME OF THE YEAR!"

I figure I'll probably get around to BG3 eventually, but if you're making romance a major selling point of an RPG for me, I'm just going to be less interested in playing it over another game that didn't go on about it.

Yep. Their newest title, Shadows, has a playable romance between a black samurai and a non-binary Asian.

Cause diversity 

I don't even care about AC, only played 1 and 2, and I'm still pissed off about that.

Dammit Trump, you promised an end to DEI bs.

I hear the game is tanking pretty hard. It was already getting blasted months before it even came out.

Pissed off the entire country of Japan too I guess.

3 and 4 are pretty good ngl

I'll suffer through an annoying romance option as long as it gives some type of bonus (like an XP boost in Fallout). Piper knows if she gets chatty enough, she's getting left in the wasteland, and we all know once you go super mutant, you end up in a wheelchair.

Not an RPG, but Kiki from GTA4 was a good girlfriend to have for the perk of instantly eliminating up to 4 star wanted levels if you called her.

She came in handy during the bank robbery mission. You can call her about midway through the escape and makes the rest of that mission easy with no cops around.

That's a girl to keep around.

On the topic of game breaking, I just played through Deux Ex: Mankind Divided for the first time. The final boss absolutely decimated me for the first 4-5 attempts. Then I used the basic stun augment, cause what the hell, and apparently the boss can be stunned AND one-shot assassinated. Makes me wonder how much is meant to encourage player creativity or if it's just dev oversight. Skyrim is like that too with dual casting destruction to perma-stun anything. It's not a Bethesda game if it's not broken! By either player or studio. They really gave the player perma-slow time in Starfield. Cast, walk up, headshot, and the cooldown is over when time resumes. Fun game.

Been a while since I played Mankind, but I'm pretty sure you could do that to all the bosses on top of the option to deal with them non-lethally.

Wait, Liara was a virgin? 

She's like 100 years old, figured she probably did something within that time, but just never meant anything.

Yep, she explicitly tells Shepherd she's never done anything woth anyone cause she's been so focused on her studies she's had time for literally nothing else.

I believe the explanation was that she was fully focused on her research and barely interacted with people in general before the game. Also the 100 years is somewhat more believable for a species that lives up to 1000.