#romance-in-rpgs

#romance-in-rpgs

As I grew into a pretentious young adult in the early 00s, I started to want more from games, and I wasn't finding it. So many of them were mindless, or juvenile, or needlessly violent. So few seemed to have anything to say.

Theodore's experience with Samantha reveals a profound shift in understanding love, as he grapples with the idea of sharing an AI's affection with many others, challenging his human limitations.

Life Is Strange: Reunion quadruples down on this treatment of him, with the only mention of Warren coming in a text message in which Max asks 'whatever happened to that guy' who could've been her high school sweetheart.

Last year changed the way many of us thought about software. It certainly changed the way I did. I spent much of 2025 building, probing, and questioning how to build software, and in many more ways what I want to do.

Dimension 20 has primarily used Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition across its campaigns, with occasional side quests using other systems. The main cast has only deviated from D&D for the sixth campaign, A Starstruck Odyssey, which utilized an unofficial Star Wars system.

The study, published in the Current Psychology journal, was conducted by researchers from SWPS University and the Stefan Batory Academy of Applied Sciences, who set out to measure the 'sense of emptiness that arises after completing a deeply immersive game.' Post-Game Depression, or P-DGS, was measured across two separate studies, with a total of 373 participants.

Crystal Dynamics is developing a new The Lord of the Rings game, which would be its third game now in development, joining Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis and Tomb Raider: Catalyst.

Timber Rush is about numbers going up in the crudest way imaginable, a clicker game that barely even features clicking, in which you move your woodcutter side to side as increasing numbers of increasingly silly logs fly around the screen.

Square Enix is partnering with Google to integrate its AI large language model Gemini into Dragon Quest X, creating a Slime character that players can chat with. This character will respond with AI-generated text, offering tips, tricks, and advice as players navigate the game.

To answer that question, our resident RPG-enthusiast Ram Iyer put together a set of five general questions about Baldur's Gate, which we ran against xAI and the three major models in a kind of quasi-benchmark that I've decided to call BaldurBench. In the interest of journalistic transparency, I've made all the chat transcripts public, so you can see them here: Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

My feeling is that BioWare has always been changing,