Compared to other major fantasy RPGs, the gameplay of Obsidian Entertainment’s next game lacks a romance option…

Baldur’s Gate 3 or Dragon Age: The Veilguard have romance options. This is not the way Avowed will go, as the game’s director Carrie Patel told GamesRadar at the recent EGX. The short way to explain her reasoning would be that it would be too much work to implement, so you could say, somewhat sarcastically, that the studio is a bit lazy…

“It works very well in some games. It’s a lot of work. You want to make sure you get it right. And part of that is you want to make sure that if a player chooses not to romance, but they still want to have a very deep relationship with those companions, that they can have just as thorough and meaningful an experience on a friendship or ally path as they would have on a romance path. And so we felt that we could best tell the stories of our companions and our players’ relationships with them without the romance option.

With the four companions, we wanted them all to have key roles in the story, different party roles, different personalities, and ways that they could complement each other and tell the story of the Living Lands to the player. It’s a story that I don’t think you see a lot in a lot of games with a party member that travels with you, and so one thing that players will really get to explore with her here is how she navigates having her heart in one place and knowing that she really needs to be here,” Patel said.

Obsidian has gone down this road before, with Fallout: New Vegas, which also didn’t have a romantic option, though you could spend the night with some NPCs, but nothing more serious than that. The same principle was followed in The Outer Worlds. Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire was an exception, although it was a CRPG with an isometric view, so it needed much less work compared to a third-person game…

Avowed will be released on February 18th for Xbox Series and PC (and will also be on Game Pass).

Source: WCCFTech, Gamesradar