God, I love romance. That tingle up your spine when someone laces their fingers between yours for the first time. The rush of blood blossoming across your cheeks when their eyes meet yours and you gaze through those pools of colour into their very soul. The shortness of breath, the butterflies, the scary, exhilarating feeling of falling with no safety net. Ah. Isn’t it wonderful?
There have only been a handful of games that have connected with that side of me – the hopeless romantic, too free with my emotions, too easy to hurt. One of those was Cibele – the heartbreaking, semi-autobiographical tale of the developer Nina Freeman’s online romance and subsequent rejection. Oh, Nina. I’ve been there, and still it keeps happening. I hope you’ve learned. I hope I will.
The other is Dragon Age: Inquisition, the title from Canadian studio Bioware, which came out in late 2014. Bioware’s oeuvre is ostensibly action-adventure role-playing games in which you invariably have to save the world, or the galaxy, from demon armies or alien invaders. But for me – and probably a large percentage of players – they aren’t about that at all. They are all about the smoochin’.
In a Bioware game, the romance isn’t a side-quest or an optional extra – it is a central component of the action. In a Bioware game, your lust is as important as your weapon ammo. I mean, you can avoid romance if you absolutely must, but you’ll have to turn down a whole bunch of amorous suitors in the 30 hours it takes to finish a game, and that’s really mean spirited. Romance is a part of everyday existence. You go out there, you fight the monsters, and then you come back for a snuggle with your extraterrestrial paramour. It’s a metaphor for working life if ever there was one.
But it’s actually more complicated than that. Each potential romance in a Bioware title comes with issues, a backstory and fascinating parallels with the game at large. In the Mass Effect games you may fall for hothead reptilian Garrus or the blue-skinned Liara, and in doing so, you find yourself getting an insight into human/alien relations. Or maybe you find yourself getting close to Morinth and … well, Morinth will kill you, because she’s basically a preying mantis that makes people explode after sex.
Bioware writes some of the most intricate and well-crafted romantic narratives outside of actual dating games – or indeed outside of romantic comedy cinema. It’s thanks to this that I almost fell, really quite seriously, for one of the characters in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Dorian. Oh Dorian.
There’s something fascinating about a character that’s so well written that they’re real enough to trick you into wanting to make babies with them. Dragon Age: Inquisition should be celebrated for that.
So – what’s up with Bioware’s Mass Effect: Andromeda trailers? So far, they’ve been heavy on the action, the adventure, and the RPG bits, but not on the romance. In fact, there’s been none at all. Not even a peck on the cheek of some strangely coloured space stud. In one way, I totally get it – you don’t want to spoil the potential kissing bits – but if a trailer is supposed to hype you up for the main game, then for a Bioware title, it’s a weird thing to miss out completely.
Is it because romance in a big AAA game isn’t taken seriously? There really aren’t many trailers for blockbuster games that include aspects of romance, even when it’s a title like Harvest Moon, where getting married is a huge in-game goal. Meanwhile over in Hollywood, even trailers for the manliest, explosion-filled action movies, will let you glimpse a passionate snog midway through a very important mission or on top of a jet fighter or whatever. The James Bond franchise is advertised equally on the character’s ability to punch some faces while snogging others.
It all seems like a relic of a different era, when video game marketers were convinced that all players were 13-year-old boys who would go “ewwwww” at the sight of pixelated smooching. Well, we’ve grown up, some of us aren’t even boys. Uncharted has provided something of an exception, making a big deal of the relationship between Nathan and Elena in its publicity hype – so Bioware trailers should really be maxing out on this stuff.
But they’re not.
So, Bioware: what are you trying to hide? Are you ashamed of your smoochiness? Will there be less smoochiness in Mass Effect: Andromeda? As it’s a game about colonisation, it is surely safe to assume that romance and relationships will feature. So why isn’t it a key factor in the marketing?
There may well be a fear that playing up the romance will make some people take Mass Effect less seriously. Those people are hard to please, and they’re also wrong. It was, after all, a love scene in the original Mass Effect that briefly made it the most controversial game in the world, thanks to a hilarious Fox News sex panic. Also, Bioware’s dialogue and narrative design always combine romance and cheeky humour with super serious political intrigue – just like all the amazing box set television we’re binging on. So in the next set of trailers, let’s have a bit less exploring and danger and a bit more love and understanding. Give me the smooching I deserve.
