Owlcat’s had some unusual problems writing romance: ‘we realized we had three female romanceable characters, and all three were cannibals’

On the CRPG-developer-romance spectrum, Obsidian are at one end—generally anti-romance—while BioWare and Larian are at the other end. As is Owlcat, whose Rogue Trader and Pathfinder games all feature romanceable companions. The reasoning behind that, and the particulars of how romance works in Pathfinder, is the topic of discussion in the studio’s latest developer blog.

As Owlcat explains, while it’s boring to “make a nice average waifu for everyone and for no one”, sometimes they’ve gone too far in the other direction and away from the norm. “In fact,” they write, “we had this situation early on during Wrath of the Righteous production. At some point we realized we had three female romanceable characters, and all three were cannibals.”

Which explains why Arueshalae, the succubus on a path to redemption, has clearly-added-later dialogue about how she’s unusual among demons for not liking the taste of human flesh. (Although that still suggests she knows what it tastes like.) Meanwhile, Wenduag the spider-legged mutant got to remain a cannibal, since if you’re into her you’re clearly into the freaky stuff. The third option is in spoiler territory. But Owlcat does note, due to that rewrite, “Arueshalae was somewhat shifted toward the ‘average-pleasant’ type, but fortunately, she didn’t become that type entirely.”

Having romanced Arueshalae in Wrath of the Righteous, I did find her storyline a bit bland. Maybe if they’d left in some of the edginess it would have been better? It’s hard to say. On my next playthrough I’ll probably romance Daeran. It seems like a lot of effort went into his romance arc, with a waterfall added to the map just so you can have a scene together when you stumble across it.

Kingmaker had interesting romance options too, including a polyamorous couple you can either break up or join. In my first playthrough I was amused to start romancing one and then have the other show up and, rather than being jealous, basically give the whole thing their blessing and offer to get in on the action.

Don’t expect to see more of that in future Owlcat games, though. As the blog post puts it, polyamory ended up being a lot of work and, “as much as we’d like to experiment in this area, the problem with polyamory in role-playing games is the complexity and cost of development, which are growing exponentially.”

Owlcat just revealed two new companion characters for its Warhammer 40,000 RPGs, one coming to Rogue Trader as DLC and the other to Dark Heresy, which is currently in alpha. No word yet on whether they’re romanceable—or whether they’re cannibals.