The other day, I was writing about Baldur’s Gate 3 celebrating its anniversary with statistics about all the companions that people have smooched over the course of the game’s first year of operation. And that prompted a discussion about the fact that this is clearly a market that MMORPGs have generally been kind of ignoring over the past forever. You still cannot kiss your favorite NPC on their little mouth in basically any MMORPG, and why is that?
Well… all right, there are actually a lot of reasons, starting with the fact that there are a lot of MMO players who can in fact be really weird about any mention of romance, sex, or intimacy. So that’s kind of an issue. But that doesn’t mean that nothing has changed since then, so let’s take a look at how MMORPGs have changed over the years and why this might be something actually worth investing in at this point.
In the early years of MMORPGs, story was hardly a dirty word, but it was also hardly a focal point from a development standpoint. There were stories, obviously; there was an entire world there, after all. You have quests, you have stories. But the idea was that the main sort of stories you would be making would be those with other players, and the game’s job was mainly to give you the framework to tell those stories.
That isn’t going to stop anyone from engaging in the time-honored art of shipping, of course. People always do that, especially weird nerds with weird nerd hobbies. But video game culture was different in the early aughts; it’s worth noting that while games like Baldur’s Gate II and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic helped introduce mainstream gaming audiences to the idea of having big sprawling RPGs where you also pick whom you want to smooch, they didn’t come out until 2000 and 2003, respectively.
In other words, the earliest MMORPGs were not built around a framework where shipping with NPCs was going to be a thing, and that was fine. There would be fanfics for it, there always are, but you did not log into World of Warcraft on launch day annoyed because you couldn’t make bedroom eyes at Bolvar Fordragon in a way that matter. You logged in annoyed at other things. This wasn’t exactly an expected thing.
In the past few decades, MMORPGs have changed.
It’s all well and good – and correct, in fact – to note that Star Wars: The Old Republic definitely tried to bring companion romances into the game when it launched. It didn’t work very well, but part of the reason as I’ve noted before is that SWTOR lacked a very specific special sauce that had (at that point) been working very well for BioWare up until that point. What made the game romances appealing was that you didn’t have writers trying to write eight different Aloof Sniper Dudes; you had one Garrus Vakarian, which meant that you got the best version of the general concept.
But SWTOR was definitely not completely out in the weeds when it posited that story and world connection were going to be a big deal for MMORPGs. Oh, sure, it didn’t really deliver on that idea terribly well itself, but that was more about design issues that we don’t really have the space to go into here. The fact of the matter is that if you give a bunch of MMO fans characters they like and a story they care about, there will be shipping.
And these days, there is a heck of an engine around shipping.
It should not be lost on you that all of the Big Five MMOs not only have stories of varying scope and style but have have characters that people love. There is an entire YouTube channel run by one woman who makes a bunch of really cute Final Fantasy XIV videos devoted entirely to the idea that she just really likes shipping her character with G’raha Tia. The developers are fully aware of the emotional bonds people form with characters in this game. And that’s just a game where I know the characters very well; I don’t remember their names on demand, but I know people are absolutely in love with some of the companions in The Elder Scrolls Online, for example.
So why don’t we take a page from games like BG3 and have some romances with NPCs? Why don’t developers lean in on this when you already have the players who are absolutely eager to hop in and smooch the NPCs that they’ve been making eyes at for ages now? Do you think there are not plenty of people who would jump at the chance to whisper sweet nothings at Jaina Proudmoore? I’d be willing to bet good money on that one.
But… that’s also kind of the problem, too. Because there’s a difference between single-player games and multiplayer ones, and it’s the “multiplayer” part being a basic element of the game.
While BG3 has a multiplayer component, it is still structured as a fundamentally single-player game, which is obviously what it was built to be. You go through the game, front to back. There is not a veneer of persistence on top of the game; you are not going to be heading back to the Underdark in Act 3 to pick up your dailies from the myconids. And that means that you don’t have to worry about, say, your other party members also romancing Shadowheart at the same time you’re trying to. If you want that to happen, you can just load up the game on your own.
In a way, this is kind of the problem that MMORPGs are still grappling with. I tackled this in a pair of Storyboard columns about the different kinds of story, player-driven vs. developer-crafted, as well as which stories are “real” in this context, but there is still going to be friction between the idea of a scripted story that has a beginning, middle, and end in an ongoing game where you still need a reason for all of this stuff to exist.
Add on the fact that some people can be really weird just about romance and intimacy, and you can sort of see why some developers might say that the easiest option is to just not bother. If you want to ship yourself with characters in Guild Wars 2, you can, but it’s much easier to just leave that in the theater of the mind’s eye rather than trying to put it into systems.
Does that mean it’s a bad idea? Well… no. The thing about ideas that people haven’t tried before is that sometimes it feels inevitable for someone to give it a shot. The first implementations might be cringeworthy, but we’ve had in-game marriage systems in MMORPGs for years. I won’t be surprised when one decides that you can try your hand with an NPC if you really want to. (Just don’t ask Raph Koster; I think he’s got other plans for his game right now. Although if you want to make me look really ridiculous, Mr. Koster, I did just offer you an easy layup.)
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
