RPG romances can be a little awkward at times. It's difficult to get a real, human feeling out of snatching yourself a half-elf gf by picking the right dialogue options. Josh Sawyer, veteran RPG designer, certainly has his qualms with them, but he believes if he was to ever commit to making an RPG romance system, he'd base it off one game.
That game is Cyberpunk 2077, a title that stands out to Sawyer because it treats its romances a little differently. You're not trying to rizz up your beau in the middle of a party of six. Instead, you progress individually with a character, hanging out with them, developing a relationship, and then you won't be able to progress further until the critical path has been furthered.
"You do something with Judy, let's say, and then, you wrap it up, you have a convo, and then she's like, 'I gotta go do some things, bye,'" Sawyer told PCGamer. "She is gone and you're not going to hear from her until time has elapsed, and probably until you've progressed a critical path. There's a built-in pacing, so the development of the human component of that relationship is developed over content that is specifically made for the two of you, like it's content for you and Judy alone. River doesn't come into it at all."
"Some of it is production value, which, of course, Obsidian is not necessarily the big cutscene company," Sawyer said, explaining why perhaps some studios do romances differently to others. "Larian does that extremely well. Of course CDPR does that exceptionally well. BioWare also does it well."
Besides cinematics, Sawyer believes pacing is still king. "It's not to say that's flawless, but I really do enjoy that way of doing them. If I were gonna base romances on anything, I'd probably do something like that."