On the CRPG-developer-romance spectrum, Obsidian are at one end—generally anti-romance—while BioWare and Larian are at the other end. As is Owlcat, whose Rogue Trader and Pathfinder games all feature romanceable companions. The reasoning behind that, and the particulars of how romance works in Pathfinder, is the topic of discussion in the studio’s latest developer blog.
As Owlcat explains, while it’s boring to “make a nice average waifu for everyone and for no one”, sometimes they’ve gone too far in the other direction and away from the norm. “In fact,” they write, “we had this situation early on during Wrath of the Righteous production. At some point we realized we had three female romanceable characters, and all three were cannibals.”
Which explains why Arueshalae, the succubus on a path to redemption, has clearly-added-later dialogue about how she’s unusual among demons for not liking the taste of human flesh. (Although that still suggests she knows what it tastes like.) Meanwhile, Wenduag the spider-legged mutant got to remain a cannibal, since if you’re into her you’re clearly into the freaky stuff. The third option is in spoiler territory. But Owlcat does note, due to that rewrite, “Arueshalae was somewhat shifted toward the ‘average-pleasant’ type, but fortunately, she didn’t become that type entirely.”
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Don’t expect to see more of that in future Owlcat games, though. As the blog post puts it, polyamory ended up being a lot of work and, “as much as we’d like to experiment in this area, the problem with polyamory in role-playing games is the complexity and cost of development, which are growing exponentially.”
Owlcat just revealed two new companion characters for its Warhammer 40,000 RPGs, one coming to Rogue Trader as DLC and the other to Dark Heresy, which is currently in alpha. No word yet on whether they’re romanceable—or whether they’re cannibals.
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