I had the chance to talk to veteran RPG designer Josh Sawyer (Pentiment, Pillars of Eternity, Fallout: New Vegas) at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference, and alongside other big ticket RPG topics, I had romance on my mind.
I don’t want to pigeonhole Sawyer as “the anti-RPG romance guy,” but he’s been a consistent critic of how love and sex have been implemented in the genre for years. “I don’t hate love in game stories; I just hate reducing love to shallow, masturbatory fantasy indulgence,” he said in a 2006 Obsidian forum post about the topic, preserved on Reddit. Regarding Baldur’s Gate 3’s explosively popular companion dating, Sawyer said that he doesn’t entirely get the appeal, and where he does get it, he doesn’t like it.
He most often criticizes the checklist structure of many RPG romances, but has said that he’s not opposed to them from a storytelling perspective—he seems to see it as more of a design and pacing issue. I asked Sawyer if there were any RPGs he thinks did romance right, and he answered immediately and without hesitation: Cyberpunk 2077.
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“The reason is because those relationships, whether you like the characters or not—which I feel is kind of beside the point, from a design perspective—it’s not in a party context,” Sawyer said. He argued that the typical RPG party camp/wandering around in a squad presentation makes intimate conversations and moments a bit incongruous: “There are six of us together, and we’re engaging in these romantic talks right next to everyone, and it feels kind of odd.”
Cue Wynn or Sten standing stock still in the background of a romantic cutscene in Dragon Age: Origins. It has a bit of the energy of a Weird Anime Club Couple getting too handsy in the school cafeteria. Is this allowed?!
Time to simmer
The other big issue 2077’s romances avoided, according to Sawyer, is one of pacing: In open-ended, nonlinear RPGs, “The crit path can proceed at a different rate than the side content,” said Sawyer, and that’s a challenge when it comes to making multipart side stories, particularly romantic ones, proceed at a clip that makes sense.
That’s an issue I’ve definitely run into: Expending all of a companion’s romance dialogue and being stuck at a stasis point until the next progress gate lowers. Cyberpunk’s romantic partners like Kerry or Judy have plotlines that are staggered, but they aren’t trailing behind you or hanging out at your house waiting for things to progress.
“You do something with Judy, let’s say, and then, you wrap it up, you have a convo, and then she’s like, ‘I gotta go do some things, bye,'” said Sawyer. “She is gone and you’re not going to hear from her until time has elapsed, and probably until you’ve progressed a critical path.
“There’s a built-in pacing, so the development of the human component of that relationship is developed over content that is specifically made for the two of you, like it’s content for you and Judy alone. River doesn’t come into it at all.”
Sawyer also praised Cyberpunk’s gorgeous, expensive presentation for helping the romances land. “Some of it is production value, which, of course, Obsidian is not necessarily the big cutscene company,” he said. “Larian does that extremely well. Of course CDPR does that exceptionally well. BioWare also does it well.”
In addition to those production values, Sawyer also feels that Cyberpunk’s exclusively first person perspective transformed scenes that might not have been as memorable with a cinematic camera. He pointed to a scene in the character Panam’s arc, one that potentially plays out romantically for male Vs, and platonically for female ones: “There’s the part where you come out of the storm, and you sit on the couch and she puts her legs up on you. In a first person perspective, that has such a different feeling of intimacy than if it’s a third person camera.”
But even with the great art, animation, and writing, it’s still the pacing and implementation that most won Sawyer over. “They do feel like they have their own lives, but you keep coming back together to continue that storyline,” he said. “It’s not to say that’s flawless, but I really do enjoy that way of doing them.
“If I were gonna base romances on anything, I’d probably do something like that.”
