The romance with Garrus is one of the best known and most popular of the Mass Effect series (from part 2).
link to Podcast Content
Relationships, love and sex are part of life, so they are part of video games too! But how do you represent interpersonal (or between-human-and-extraterrestrial, see Mass Effect) in such a way that we don’t immediately feel foreign shame in the flirt conversation?
Micha talks about this in the podcast with our editorial dating simulation fan Mary and with Géraldine, who engineered various dalliances in The Sims and Stardew Valley and also has half a chicken coop to pluck with the romances of Dragon Age.
All episodes and formats in our podcast overview
In general: the Bioware formula. Relationships are a cornerstone of Bioware RPGs from Dragon Age to Mass Effect, and yes, Bioware has managed to give us interesting characters to fall in love with on a number of occasions. That’s light years more mature than the sex trading cards from the first The Witcher, and a lot more interesting than marrying Jordis, the Sword Maiden from Skyrim (and every other Bethesda character, except maybe Fallout 4’s Curie).
Nevertheless, the Bioware romances run according to the scheme F – or scheme A for chosen ones: we choose the object of our desire and start flirting. Wouldn’t it be possible to bring in a bit more unpredictability?
Tonproblem: Due to a defect in our mixer, our sound doesn’t sound as good as usual. We apologize for that and still love our mixer (lied).
However, Stardew Valley is outstanding in its depiction of relationships, in which romances even influence each other. Géraldine also recommends the mod Stardew Valley Expanded, which adds significantly more relationships – including with a mother or her son.
We owe the fact that we can talk about it at all to a remarkable development. While “relationships” in early video games still followed the damsel in distress pattern, letting us as heroes rescue kidnapped princesses, romances have since become much more profound.
Why actually? What do relationships add to a game that we would otherwise be missing? We discuss that in the podcast too!
You can find out more about the FYNG Love Edition, where we also recorded our podcast, in the article:
more on the subject
Find Your Next Game: Love Edition – Unser großes Live-Event im Februar
More podcasts
We recommend our RSS feed for Plus users, with which you can download all episodes onto your smartphone. A bonus episode is released every Wednesday exclusively for GameStar Plus.
There is also the GameStar podcast on:
Feel free to write in the comments which podcast topics you would like to see next! And also listen to our second podcast “What are you playing?”, in which members of the editorial staff and sometimes guests briefly and concisely present their current favorite games. Well, or less briefly and concisely, when Micha has to defend himself against Géraldine’s infamous vampire accusations.
