>>1125037 Make them persona style social links that give benefits the more you hang out with someone

In game dating is mostly used as wish fulfillment and/or is limited with no real impact on gameplay. Danganronpa V3 has love suite scenes mostly catering to certain fetishes, when before in Danganronpa 1 it's more varied for example.

Turning in-game dating into a series of mini-games instead of a series of dialogue trees?

What is the gold standard for a romance in video games? Bastilla from KOTOR1 comes to mind.

>>1125037 Make it so that you have to push back on their bullshit in order to create a spark. Being a doormat should be an autofail.

>>1125037 This guy wants to fuck alien and monster girls! ..... and so do i!

>>1125265 Better just make the dialogue trees interesting with branching paths that the romance can take. Too much of it is just ass-kissing

>>1126334 A tale as old as Time.

>>1125037 I liked Panam in cyberpunk. I think romance options are successful when they make me feel like shit for feeling something for a video game character and remind me I have nobody.

>>1125274 >What is the gold standard for a romance in video games?

>>1126521 sadly the genre is deader then disco with no forseeable titles in the future.

Mass Effect was shit from day one.

A good starting point would be hiring people who can actually write. This is next to impossible with current credentialism and woman-focus so simply put you are not getting any decent romance of any kind in your videogames.

>>1126334 You say that like most people don't

The biggest issue with Mass Effect's romance is how they don't let you bang more aliens, and it's especially bad for homos (male, female homos get decent waifus) who have to pick between the cast of Jersey Shore. Though I do follow the Chris Avellone school of "romance in games is weird and creepy", if you're gonna do it at least do it right. What's worse are games that have romance but it's le quirky and ironic like Saints Row 4. >>1125274 Disco Elysium :^)

>>1125037 >again It was never "cool"

>>1125037 >Mass Effect ruined an otherwise promising thing. In hindsight, not really. Romance ultimately gravy to a game at best unless you have highly unrealistic scope or dedicate a majority of a game to it specifically (like I dunno, a VN). They can give you mechanical benefits like what >>1125083 said, some altered dialogue, maybe a bonus scene after the credits roll, but trying to tie entire alterations to it introduces a bunch of complications: >how many story beats is this character involved with that we have to check for? >Accounting for players that don't bother with romance, will we basically have extra routes to work on? >What if you fuck up the romance, will we have to account for THAT too? Brushing these sorts of things off can cause the romance to feel "disjointed" from the rest of the story - especially if it's meant to touch upon core aspects of the character that will be story-relevant later. This results in writing snafus like learning a lesson only to entirely forget it because a key turning point is predicated on that flaw, gating romance points and spoiling the player on later events, awkwardly dancing around the plot by putting the story in a "white room", so we're talking having zany chase antics when someone's dad just died dramatically (Fire Emblem's supports run into this a lot).

>>1125037 Romance systems are pretty much never good in games because in most games the player character is a swashbuckler or pulp-action hero. Getting married is the death of that type of character, there is a reason tongue-in-cheek phrases such as "the old ball and chain" exist. Settling down is the end of the adventure. Having maidens swoon at the hero, that's fine, seducing a foreign princess to escape a perilous situation? great very pulp adventure. But a full on dating system? It just doesn't fit. And the NPC 'wife' is always an afterthought, there is rarely any depth. Unless your game is about the romance between two characters I think it's just better left unsaid, implied, or saved for the ending.

>>1125037 Start by making hot girls again >ME trilogy >sexy >ME Andromeda >S H R E K

>>1184341 >He wouldn't fuck the shit out of Ogre Fiona ngmi

>>1184341 the fish heads were always ugly as sin

>>1185501 Imagine the vigorous gobbling though

>>1125274 Swordcraft Story trilogy

>>1125037 It was never cool.

When was it ever cool before Mass Effect? I just need to know what you're talking about more specifically, because I never found dating in games to be cool in any way, shape or form. It's a cringe, fake fest of wish fulfillment. I'll accept that games provide wish fulfillment in other aspects that are basically impossible to experience elsewhere, like pretending you are the savior of all humanity and the chosen one, super talented and all of that other bullshit, but at least that's utterly impossible for a single person to achieve and experience. Romance in games is a predetermined path where you engage in the fanfic of an author where you pretend to fall in love with a character and vice-versa, you're basically playing pretend with text. It's fake and gay as fuck and you should do better with your time than genuinely wish we had more or better of that. The only way romance is acceptable in a game is if it's out of your control (As in, your main character is already in a relationship with another character and they interact like couples in universe story). Agentic dating in video-games is cringe.

>>1125037 By having more HMoFA content, specifically with furred females

>>1125037 >pic Bruh. Please don't tell me someone wants to bang female Greedo

>>1186904 The swordcraft story games were an absolute treasure, Its a crime how forgotten they are. >>1184178 Honestly I think it works very well in things like fire emblem. Its bad in games where the PC is a blank slate for you to project on, but games were you get to play match maker instead and guide other's through romances is cool Especially if the game is paced right and you can do multiple generations of characters. >>1188732 I always had a softspot for sci-fi with fucked up bizzare genders and sex. Creatures that change sex as they age, so literally a race of cougars and shotas, 3 gendered races, so they can only reproduce by engaging in threesomes, creatures that change sex when they have sex.