When you think of a BioWare RPG, you probably think about the romances. Well, I do, at least, and I know there are plenty of freaks like me out there who get unreasonably obsessed with whoever their character smooches (Alistair Theirin, call me).
However, we almost didn't get these romances. That's because BioWare doubted players would actually be interested in romance, and thought we all flocked to RPGs to "fight s**t and battle dragons," as studio veteran David Gaider puts it.
This comes from a Baldur's Gate 2 retrospective for PC Gamer, with Gaider and other devs reflecting on BioWare's genre-defining RPG. Baldur's Gate 2 was the first BioWare game to give us the iconic "BioWare romance", but back then, it was a total shot in the dark.
"The whole romance thing was just an experiment, like James [Ohlen, lead designer] had no idea that anybody would even like this," says Gaider. "We were writing these long stories, and they were cool, but romance? It was like, ‘People don't come here to romance, they come here to fight s**t and battle dragons!'"
Surprisingly, Gaider didn't want to write the romances, insisting that he was "not a romantic guy". But...
