I was disappointed with Uncharted 3 for a number of reasons. Certainly one of those reasons was that the game had bizarre difficulty spikes and could be kind of a dick sometimes. But another, possibly bigger reason was that while Uncharted 3 generally mirrored the pacing and story-arc of Uncharted 2, it lacked one of my favorite things about its predecessor: Chemistry. Specifically, the romantic chemistry born of the love-triangle between Nathan Drake, Chloe, and Elena. More love-triangles in games, please!
https://lastchance.cc/man-uncharted-3-can-be-a-real-dick-sometimes-5856618%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
Anyone whoâs played Uncharted 2 probably remembers this scene above many others (skip to 3:50 in the video). In it, protagonist Nathan Drake and his current girl Chloe Frasier stumble upon Elena Fisher, the love interest from the first game. Awkwardness ensues. (âElena Fisher, last yearâs model.â)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuiYd5FPNKk
Itâs a remarkable scene: Fun, genuine-feeling, and a great break from the shoot-climb-run-shoot tension of the rest of the game. The ensuing love-triangle plays out over the course of the rest of the game, and Drakeâs eventual choice feels honest, earned, and does a lot to inform the player of the true nature of all three of the characters.
Have you guys read The Hunger Games? Those are some fuuunnn books, buddy. I didnât know anything about them, and then I watched the trailer for the upcoming film adaptation, at which point I said, âWait a minute, that is The Hunger Games? Sold.â I Kindle-d them over the holidays and read the entire thing in about three days; I havenât devoured a series of books like that in a good long while. I generally describe them thusly: âBloody-minded teen fiction that merges The Running Man with a touch of Twilight. Nowhere near as annoying as Twilight.â
Have you guys read The Hunger Games? Those are some fuuunnn books, buddy.
The books, written by Suzanne Collins, actually have little in common with Stephanie Meyersâ indulgently trashy vampire/chastity-porn. However, their most Twilight-ish elementâthe love triangle that runs through all three booksâis also one of my favorite parts. As much fun as it is to read about Katniss Everdeen fighting for survival against a monolithic dystopian government, itâs just as fun to follow her ambivalent, surprisingly low-key relationships with two young men, both of whom love her in different, unequivocal ways. Of course, The Hunger Games differs from Twlight in another key way: The love triangle isnât the entire point of the story. Itâs merely something going on alongside the main storyline.
Game or book, neither of the love triangles Iâve just described are interactive, but some games attempt to allow players more control. Almost all of BioWareâs games feature possible love-triangles to some extent, and players get to choose who their protagonist will ultimately wind up with. In games like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire, romance is always on the table, and if you romance too many potential partners, it becomes a problem. After spending the whole game romancing as many people as possible, a couple of them will usually decide theyâve had enough and come to the player to ask for clarity. âYouâve led us both on,â they say, ânow you must choose.â And as the characters say it, so too does the gameâonce youâve made your choice, thereâs no going back. Bo-oring!
This binary resolution loses sight of what makes ongoing love triangles so much fun. The triangle itself is much more interesting than the resolution. The actual resolution of The Hunger Gamesâ triangle (donât worry! I wonât tell you.) is less interesting than the ongoing, slow-burn tension between Katniss, Peeta and Gale. Ditto Uncharted 2, except with the long-running, subtle tension between Drake, Chloe, and Elena.
Furthermore, BioWare has a formula that they seem to followâyou express interest over the course of the story, and then, near the end, you finally have some sexytimes. That forumla has become a bit tired for me, and Iâm ready to see it shaken up. Most BioWare games keep characters separate, and itâs to the gamesâ detriment. Thereâs little sense of a fluid interaction among, say, the crew of the Normandy, so the fact that my Mass Effect Commander Shepard can flirt with Miranda in her office before heading downstairs to flirt with Subject Zero in her basement room means that the relationships all revolve around Shepard, but rarely intersect with one another. The original Mass Effect (and to some extent, Mass Effect 2) had some fun moments where, in the post-mission briefing, Ashley would be catty and dismissive of Liara, seemingly out of jealousy of her connection with Shepard. But that was about as far as it went.
I realize how much more difficult it would be to pull this sort of thing off, but imagine how much more fun it would be if the relationships in Mass Effect or Dragon Age spilled over into the missions? Iâm picturing the romantic tension between Samara, Thane, and Shepard coming to a boil in the midst of a highly stressful, action-packed mission. That kind of drama is what makes the latter half of Uncharted 2âs Kathmandu level so tenseâDrake has been reunited with Elena, Chloeâs loyalties appear to have shifted in the heat of the moment, and everything has become much more fluid and interesting.
One recent game made built its entire gameplay structure on a love triangle, with damned cool results. Iâm talking, of course, about Atlusâ Catherine, a game that both literally and metaphorically concerned itself with romantic geometry. Everything in the game revolved around protagonist Vincent pushing upwards en route to one of two womenâhis steady girlfriend Katherine or his sexy, dangerous paramour, Catherine. Vincent wasâoften literally!âbalancing over a pit of nothingness, forced to face his anxieties and figure out who, exactly he wanted to be. The gameâs entire morality system was based around this one choice.
As I play Catherine, I feel like Iâm getting to know Vincent, even if I donât really like him. The choices he makes arenât always the ones Iâd make, and if you ask me, neither of these women seems like much of a prize. But thatâs the pointâin letting us inside of Vincentâs head and decision-making process, we learn about a character that is in fact much more human and interesting than your average video game protagonist, Nathan Drake and Commander Shepard included.
So, sure; love triangles can be terrific foils for character-development. Theyâre a great trope for storytelling, and can even serve as a basis for the gameâs core design. But theyâre also just a lot of fun. People love to choose sides, to root for their favoriteâthereâs a reason that âTeam Edwardâ and âTeam Jacobâ t-shirts sell so well.
I hope to see more drawn-out, complicated love-triangles in video games to come. Furthermore, I hope that game writers can keep in mind that romance, much like video games themselves, is more about the journey than the destination.
Our friends John Flansburgh and John Linell may have said it best:
Triangle Man, Triangle Man
Triangle Man hates Particle Man.
They have a fight; Triangle wins.
Triangle man.
See that, video game writers? Triangle wins.
