Romance options are pretty popular in RPGs these days, and even though Avowed doesn’t have any, its director thinks it’s better off without one.
For reasons that will probably be pretty obvious, video game players love to digitally smooch other video game characters, with romance options being quite popular in a lot of RPGs, no doubt due to the influence of games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age. It’s been a big part of why Baldur’s Gate 3 is so popular, people just can’t get their hands off characters like Astarion. But one of next year’s biggest RPGs, Avowed, won’t have any romance options, despite it being a pretty common thing to find in the genre these days. In a recent interview with GamesRadar, director Carrie Patel explained why Obsidian Entertainment’s latest won’t have any with a simple explanation: “It’s a ton of work.”
Okay, Patel actually had more to say on the topic, as she goes on to say, “You want to make sure you do it right. And part of that is also you want to make sure that a player who opts not to romance but still wants to have a very deep relationship with those companions gets to have just as thorough and meaningful an experience on a friendship or ally path as [if] they went on a romance path. And so we felt that we could best tell our companions’ stories and our players’ relationships with them without the romance option.”
Something that was important for the dev team was making sure that every companion felt fleshed out and that all players will experience them on the same terms, an important point in the game’s overall story. “With the four companions we wanted them to all have key roles in the story, different party roles, different personalities, and ways that they compliment each other and let them tell the story of the Living Lands to the player,” Patel said.
There’s even one companion that is actually in a relationship, apparently a key component of said character’s development. “[It] isn’t a story that I think you often get to see in a lot of games with a party member who’s travelling with you, and so one thing players will really get to explore with here is kind of how she navigates having her heart in one place, while knowing that she really needs to be here.”
Personally I’m not too fussed about the idea of not being able to romance anyone; oftentimes the writing isn’t even strong enough to support it, so I’d rather see companions and NPCs have their own stories and relationships.
Avowed was originally slated to be released this year, but in August Xbox announced that it had been delayed to February 18, 2025 – when it’s out you’ll be able to play it on Xbox Series X/S and PC.
