The Seeds of Romance

NowGamer has kicked up a four-page editorial that examines “the most famous and accomplished examples of amorous interplay in games”, and it comes as no surprise that BioWare is mentioned within.

Take, for example, the romance options BioWare presented to the player in Mass Effect. Whether you picked the Sexy Xenophobe, the Whiny Bisexual Alien, or The One Guy, it was more or less a process of choosing the most affectionate dialogue branch whenever it was made available usually after completing a major plot node and revelling in how much of a Lothario you were. The payoff for all this hard work was the much-discussed sex scene.

This is the case for most BioWare games, the studio’s designers being somewhat renowned for their fondness of compelling virtual relationships. And despite their relative simplicity in a gameplay sense, it’s fair to say the Edmonton-based developer is one of the better studios out there in this regard, primarily because its games tend to be well written. The best example of this romance-craftsmanship can be found in what is arguably its best game: Baldur’s Gate II. While it offered the player an unprecedented number of possible love interests, the most nuanced, compelling, and difficult to see to its end, was unarguably Jaheira.

As you might recall, Jaheira was Khalid’s ballsy Elven wife in the first game. While many players fantasised about disarming (and disrobing) that churlish wench even then, it wasn’t until she emerged alive in the sequel, sans husband, that they got their chance. Stricken with grief over Khalid’s untimely death, Jaheira was wounded, vulnerable, and mercifully open to the player’s advances. But to win her heart required them to traverse an insane or perhaps realistic number of obstacles, many of them time-based.

First, you had to be amenable to her many interjections about bad dreams. Then it was a matter of buying her a necklace and fulfilling her duties to her former employers, the Harpers. And then you needed to express your willingness to surrender your belongings to a group of bandits who accost her, and. well, the relationship was so complex and took so long to develop that many found themselves accidentally finishing the game before they’d earned her trust. This demonstrates BioWare’s willingness to take inter-character relationships very seriously, and also provides evidence that elves are a high-maintenance bunch.