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Baldur's Gate III
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Lặn sâu vào sự lãng mạn - Cuộc phỏng vấn Baudelaire Welch của Larian Studios
Chúng tôi đã trò chuyện với Baudelaire Welch, Nhà thiết kế tường thuật cao cấp trên Baldur's Gate III về cách lãng mạn chơi game khác với lãng mạn trong tất cả các phương tiện truyền thông khác.
Phiên âm âm thanh
"Hi, it's Jakob here from Gamereactor. We are at Nordic Games, but now we are not gonna focus just on one game. We are gonna focus on a theme, and that theme is romance. Romance in gaming.
And I'm here with Bordelaire Welch, who has extensive knowledge of the subject, let's say it like that. So yeah, could you maybe start by introducing how you have worked with this topic in gaming?
Hi, so I was the companion character narrative design lead on Baldur's Gate 3, and that involved designing a lot of romance quests and plot lines. But before that, I was writing fanfiction about Baldur's Gate."
"I went to go and work on it after Early Access was released. And before that, I worked on an interactive fiction game for Choice of Games, which had a heavy meta-commentary on romances in gaming as a whole. It's called Don't Make Me Up, and it asked the question, what if video game love interests were sentient AIs who could respond to the way that players sexualize them?
So I've thought a lot about this theme throughout my career. Yeah, and of course romance in video games is a bit different than in real life and also in movies, because it often involves hidden variables."
"So what are some of the unique challenges in designing romance for video games as a medium?
Well, one of the points that I made in my talk is that video games have a longer play time and a longer time that players spend in them than almost any other art form. And I think that too many times we've designed video game romance quests so that love is some kind of final gameplay reward. Sex is a final gameplay reward that's the culmination at the end of a quest. And I really think that, you know, if we have a really long play time in a video game, why not start a romance around the like 10-20 hour mark?
And then there's so few times where we've ever shown a relationship evolve."
"There are so few times we've seen a relationship start and then experience challenges.
You know, when have we ever seen in video games where a romance partner you chose as a player has ended up becoming abusive, has ended up gaslighting you, has ended up perhaps feeling like their psychological state has been challenged by the romance as things progress?
And I think we have, because we have such a long form media format, really the opportunity to start to have romance plot lines that, you know, don't just end in sex, don't just end in an I love you, but start in an I love you and then show all of the challenges of relationship growing and facing its hurdles."
"Yeah, and of course normally romance in fiction is much simpler than in real life because there are these like kind of negative romances and crisis that you can, as a writer, choose not to include.
So how do you factor agency in when designing romance in games?
Well, the great thing about video games is that it's actually impossible for you to play a game without contributing some degree of desire to what you're doing, even if it's on a subconscious level."
"You know, the player, even if they don't care that much about a choice they're making, it still reflects on them that they made a choice in a game.
And romance is one of the features in games that it's easiest to connect to anything that we see in real life, you know.
I play a role-playing game. I decide, oh, I'm playing as an elf. Like, what does that say about me?
I'm playing neutral good, you know. I see myself as a pretty good person, but unable to commit, you know."
"I'm a barbarian. Oh, I can drink a lot, but like, you know, the time where it's like, oh, I'm playing as a man, and there's a man in my party, and he asked to kiss me, and something in me made me say yes, but I don't really know why.
Like, even the small things that feel like they're just the smallest little elements of romance can still say so much about a player, because this is a decision that just forces us to confront a question that it's pretty much exactly the same as we would confront in real life, and a video game, in order for us to continue playing it, means that we have to contribute our own desire to the equation."
"So, that really means that I think that even romances that are done in a much simpler structure and a much simpler way than, say, if there was a romance movie that's entirely pre-scripted, you know, just the decision to engage in that plot, just the decision to engage with one of these characters, it says so much more about your identity as a player, and you can learn so much more about yourself from doing an optional interactive romance in a video game where you are put in someone's shoes, and, you know, it's your self-insert."
"So, I think that we really have the opportunity to have storylines which will really, like, show players, or give players a big opportunity to explore their own identity through giving this, like, in their shoes kind of direct interactive simulation.
Yeah, and besides the games that you have worked on, which kind of games do you think does romance ride in gaming?
I think that it was an amazing system in Fire Emblem Fates and Awakening that there were just, like, romance was a background feature of the entire combat system and the gameplay systemics, and romance was not something that was just about, oh, what is happening to my player character?
What's happening to me?
But almost every single character through building bonds of friendship on the battlefield would end up in a relationship and marriage with someone else that the player is guiding them towards, and I think that seeing that kind of almost, like, social experimentation of, like, oh, I can try and pair these characters off with each other, but what are they going to be like when they're together? And having, you know, dozens and dozens of possible, like, romance stories that the player is driving in parallel."
"I think that that was really experimental, and I really sort of wish that the Fire Emblem series would continue with doing that, but in their last game, Three Houses, they went back to the, oh, there's one romance and the character proposes at the end, but I really like games where marriage and, like, other things like that can also be part of just an overall gameplay system, and I really liked working on the relationship intrigue scenes in Crusader Kings when I worked on Crusader Kings before because that was just another, like, system, and a really core part of gameplay was finding who you were going to marry off in your court, but then, of course, they may not get along with each other."
"You get a lot of events where you have to solve, like, the drama between people who are in arranged marriages, so I think that when we show romance as, like, just another part of life, but also try and, you know, integrate it into some advanced systemic social modeling, I always think that that's really cool, and it was really fun to work on that side of it on Crusader Kings, too."
"Thanks for the talk. It was very interesting to learn more about, and yeah, I wish you well in the future.
Thank you so much, and I hope that everyone watching enjoys."
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