The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

You can really hear Jeremy soule in that.

I really wish he did more games. The two franchises I played with him composing (Guild Wars and TES) has been incredible.

Romance? Elder Scrolls? They could not have foretold this.

Sounds like they're already doing half the work for the ronery waifu companion mods.

A lot of people seem to be complaining about the graphics but I think the aesthetics are more important. To me it looks great, even though it's not the best :/

I actually don't like it when I have to keep up and maintain relationships =/ The 'romantic interests' that I want, never seem to share my likes.. So I have to say screw it and pick someone else, or I have to make decisions I don't want to make.. Neither is desirable.

Or do things with a different intentions. . .

Oh great, like in every game where relationships are possible I have to follow my ritual again.

1) Woo future wife/husband
2) Marry them
3) Have a child with them
4) Kill them
5) Child goes to an orphanage
6) Carry on with the game

Morrowind had a romance quest line I remember though it was only for male characters and only the on option... I personally don't think it fits with the game tbh since your more or less a free traveling adventurer so wouldn't have time to really build/maintain a romance unless they ended up traveling with you (which I admit could be a cool concept perticularly if they can die and then quests branch out from that).

I'm not a fan of companions

Me either, I like to remain stealth and I like to move at my own pace.. Companions are almost always *** stupid and give away your position or charge off.. Unless you tell them to keep back, and when you do that, they become entirely useless instead of only mostly useless.

Maybe it is more less like the companions in Fallout. But a little more in depth.

yeah in new vegas i befriened boone and went to talk to caesar with him :/

Yeh after I posted that I remembered just how much trying to fight with them in morrowing or oblivion was... I normally played a pure archer character too and they always seemed to gravitate into the arrows path the ***... Doesn't give me a chance to reuse the arrow if it hits them XD

I enjoyed the companions in Dragon Age, especially the banter between Morrigan and Alistair.

But isn't that the main idea of Dragon Age? Make friends/lovers or enemies?

I remember Oblivion as a strong solo adventure. /edit

yeah a game with party mechanics like dragon age is not the same as a game designed for only one person doing ***

Sure, but if done well companions (even if they don't stay for a long time) are nice to have.

^No... just no

based off of their previous companions i doubt them doing that well with it

if they do it could be interesting

but most of the time in oblivion and fallout having someone follow me always seems to be more of a burden than anything else

O.O OMG I was free of the nightmare! After work Im gonna put in Oblivion just to shoot him just to put it at ease!

The reason it works in Dragon Age is because you can control your companions and tell them exactly what to do, and when.. I imagine this is going to be more like Fallout 3/NV, you can put them on attack or defense, you can have them used range or melee, but beyond that, they do what they want, and when they want. I hate that model for companions, they always screw everything up. I only even ever used a companion in NV to carry stuff around, and I didn't even use one til the very end of FO3, well I used one when I first came across that feature, but it didn't take me long to figure out that they're stupid and screw everything up <_<;;;

agreed! To me a true companion is my Moogle in my MH

Here's another classic, sorry for olde 4chan stuff. Wish I could find that copypasta about someone killing Dagoth Ur so hard that the game uninstalled.




But yeah, I can't help but feel a little excited for companions. Assuming they do it right, of course. These games never really were suited for anything beyond a solo adventure.

I'll be damned if I said I didn't have a blast bringing essential NPCs into towns and starting riots.

I'd fast travel to the wilderness only to immediately see Adoring Fan chased by bears, essentially dragging them into a bigger fight.

I agree and I'd only want a companion if it's done well, an annoying party member would just be in the way and unnecessary.

Romance in Skyrim right now is not 100%. It's probably just a quote taken out of context, that quote in particular, was an interview with Todd Howard on how they go about designing the games.

Paraphrased a little but the gist was;

"We don't set out with any particular goals in the start, except to build the largest, most compelling world possible. We have a motto in the offices, "You can do anything, you just can't do everything" so we consider an extremely broad spectrum of options we are going to give the player, you know, things like "Can they go into this house, can they kill this thing, can they interact with these objects, can you get married..." no question is off the table, we just decide where it's best to allocate our always-limited resources. Somethings make the cut, others do not..."


I believe it's incredibly immature to dictate what mediums of art are appropriate for "Romance", now, games have pretty much dropped the ball on effectively conveying these types of interactions, interactions which are integral to the human experience, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. I think there's potential here, the largest hurdle to overcome, is actually making the player care about what is essentially a packet of data. To do that, there needs to be some motivation beyond "lol fake bewbs" or whatever.

Namely a gameplay asset, this is where Fable drops the ball. "Romance", more accurately PG-Porn exists in those games only for it's own sake. The first step of course, would be limiting the "Romance" options to companions you can actually travel the world with, after that, it gets a little more complicated. I'd imagine something like specific "Standard" and "Romantic" AI packages for the characters in question, you can convey more through lack of dialog, than through an abundance there of. A Standard AI combat package might pick targets more-or-less randomly, while the "Romantic" AI package might prioritize healing the player, or attacking targets actively engaged on the player.

But all this is likely nothing, as I doubt the rumors are true.


Just regarding companions in general though, an older build of the game made it possible that every NPC in the game could become a companion. Chaos ensued. But Todd wants the overall number of possible companions to be "As large as possible, but make sense", so while they want a couple Fallout3-New Vegas style companions, a lot more will behave more like mercenaries than friends-at-arms.

100% agree with this.

Oh wait, you were talking about in games...

romance in games is always terrible lol :s besides knights of the old republic though that game was HAWT

Awesome Interview totally worth the bump

Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn tried this, and I believe it would have worked rather well except that it seemed that whoever was writing the scripts for his was cut in funding, because they either ended too quickly or began to make no sense.
On the subject of Skyrim, but honestly more toward TES6, I believe if they got the writers of BG2, the character design of TES, and the some of Square Enix's employees to create the world, we could have a serious game on our hands.