BioWare Chooses Who You Can Romance In Their Games- Here’s How

bioware_logoThere’s been a lot of talk about romancing in BioWare games. This is nothing new. We’ve discussed the topic in SWTOR quite often. Did you know that there’s more to these romances than just writing and art- although they play a huge role in it. BioWare is speaking out on this very topic to tell us more about how they choose who you can romance in their games.

There’s an official BioWare recording that explains it all. It’s audio only so we’ll cover some of the highlights for you. The just-under 50 minute audio is from the GaymerX2 convention and delivered by the writers of Dragon Age Inquisition.

In the beginning they talk about the process: how they write the friendships and flirtations, the romantic relationships and what certain romantic partners might look like. They talk about how this affects attraction and how they work with the voice actors to plan all of this out. It’s really interesting to see behind the scenes, in the game-making process and how it affects complicated parts of story like romances.

In the final 15 minutes of the recording, you’ll hear them talk about some other very interesting points. For example, they bring up that they might have polyamorous relationships in the future of BioWare games. This would let one player character be in more than one romantic relationship at a time. This is something they have wanted to do before but the computer scripting has not allowed it to work successfully yet.

Then they discuss the idea of using something other than gender and race to determine romances. Real life romances are more complex than this, of course.  They also discuss the idea of making romances more difficult, where it’s not as simple as just saying “I like you” and where it would actually be possible to fail romances and you’d have to work harder the next time.

Finally, a topic that has come up before is to have asexual romances and they have said they are considering it. It’s worth taking some time to listen to the whole thing.

What do you think about what was said by the panel? How do you think this will affect future BioWare games and their romances?

Lisa Clark

Lisa has been an avid gamer since she was old enough to hold her first controller and a game writer for more than a decade. A child of the Nintendo generation, she believes they just don’t make games like they used to but sometimes, they make them even better! While consoles will always be her first love, Lisa spends most of her gaming time on the PC these days- on MMOs and first-person shooters in particular.