#being like an archivist poring over different codexes and formulating your Takes on them and interviewing npcs

[sunlight-shunlight]

honestly i was always a bit... bewildered by bioware's business model, because i always thought (not to be a backseat game dev) it would not be hard to release supplementary vn/point and click/even twine game types of things of side content in between major releases? and that would probably provide both a mild income stream, and not need much of a budget or staff at all. something like the failbetter games collaboration they did, but more narrative focused and maybe tied more closely to the games rather than "here's a random town in orlais"

and people always say "ohhh the characters and romances are only appreciated by a small percentage of the players!!" with the implication that it's like a minority of female/queer players into it, but i really don't think that's true. the Average Man Player was also foaming at the mouth after dao because romanced morrigan mysteriously left the warden, haha. they were INVESTED. and there's the word of mouth effect too which i think is underrated - for every one person who's yapping away nonstop about Blorbo From RPGs, they have a decent chance of winning over other people who don't care about Blorbo, but just quietly like the combat or whatever regardless

and i recently read some bg3 developers saying that when they were doing EA testing, a huge portion of the players would poll as "i'm not interested in romance, only care about combat/plot" but then... they'd all pick a romance and play through it regardless. so there is really a market for that type of narrative/character focused content imo, it's sad that bioware kept remaking the entire engine and gameplay each time instead of being able to build successfully on a formula and add little side content pieces as a bonus.