Neera's romance in Ust Natha **SPOILERS**

Frkun

I got a huge WTF in the Ust Natha, the night you spend with Phaere. It doesn't matter what I do with her, Neera always comes complaining about what I did in there. She keeps telling me that she doesn't care about us and that we are free.

This happened after loong time she didn't speak to me, which makes me think I made something wrong at certain point. The last time I talked with her she was kind of upset and all the answers made her angry. She was talking about she feeling responsible for what happened and all, but she ended telling me that she cared about me. Still, I don't know what's going on since the game has no proper feedback of how the relationship is advancing.

Any clues about what I am doing wrong ? (yeah, yeah, -having a romance with Neera- ).

enqenq

Neera doesn't complain, she says she doesn't want to know. There's a difference. And I can tell you from one who got to the end of the SoA romance that she told me that too. I didn't cheat on her, so I can't promise that doing so is safe.

Use CLUAConsole:GetGlobal("NeeraRomanceActive","GLOBAL") to confirm the health of your relationship, 1 and 2 are fine. Frankly, if she's not into you, I don't think she'd have commented the event at all. Also IIRC romances are paused in the Underdark apart from the Phaere incident.

Frkun

Thanks for your comment. I think there is an issue here because actually there is no way for the player to know the results of what he did (without watching hidden values, which is cheating in the end). I think the romance's lack of feedback is wrong in terms of game design. Player should know the results of his actions. The same as when you complete a mission properly you get XP, reputation or gold and items. How would you feel if you completed a mission and you received nothing? It would feel like you did something wrong or that the mission is not completed. Not even a diary entry to say "hey, you advanced into the next step of the quest".

I think it is something to take in account for future updates or games. It wouldn't matter in a game that lasts 8 hours, but in a game that can easily last 200 hours, many players don't have time to redo everything again because a mistake you don't know when you made.

Thanks for the console help though, I didn't want to enable cheats this soon in my first playthrough, but I will have to for preventing me to waste hours, since right now my biggest interest is to see how the new character's develop.

enqenq

So what do you want? An indicator somewhere that's tied to the variable anyway? :P

recklessheart

@enqenq Pardon me for interrupting this conversation, but how did you activate the CLUAConsole in BG2:EE?

enqenq

@recklessheart http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/23801/so-to-enable-the-cluaconsole-for-bg2ee#latest

Skaffen

Ever had a real relationship? Ever got told that what you did was wrong months after the fact? I rest my case...

Frkun

@enqenq I would propose a more elegant way to do it, and that would be using the simple and always working reward system. For instance, if the conversation finishes appropiately, both characters will receive a little XP. Just something symbolic that means you achieved your goal without wondering if you did correctly or not without the use of a walkthrough. Just like when you have sex with jaheira and then the romance is broken. Come on, sex is supposed to be a reward. The game is lying to the player and that causes insecurity. It's like a leap of faith.

From a design perspective there should not be leaps of faith because if there is, the player will be affraid to go on next time. It happens to me: I am affraid of loosing Neera as I lost other characters in the past, with the difference that now I don't have 200 hours to try again with a walkthrough in hand. Unpredictibility is not difficulty. Difficulty is what makes a challenge hard to overcome. This breaks the experience, worries the player and stress the situation. It's one way situation, there is no retry possibilities and there is no way to know you succeded or failed unless you succeded and way later. There is no way to know the difference between failing, the romance to have ended or just not enough time passed. Am I supposed to wait for how long to reload the game? 10 hours? 15? How long I am supposes to wait to know if I failed and I have to reload the game? If after 10 hours of play I decide to go back, to when? Is that fun?

That's why I propose a simple feedback, just like when you complete any mission succesfuly you receive a bonus XP, the same here. I know, it's just a quick idea and I am sure the developers will find better solutions, but a feedback I think is necessary, specially if we talk about something of one way, something that you cannot retry again, you have to be sure of what happened, and the dialogs in case of neera's romance, is quite ambiguous. It really frightened me to think in the possibility of having messed up everything after all the time invested in the asylum, underwater city and underdark, which at this point is almost complete, and even more, not sure when the next dialog will appear, or if it will.

enqenq

I'm not sure the game should incentivize you replying with whatever your love interest wants (or needs) to hear. So whipped bro! It would be cool if there were more paths than just romance vs. no romance, and mutually exclusive ones of course, so that you actually make a choice rather than try to figure out the one true path to naked fun times.

FYI though despite Neera being a CN wild mage, I didn't find her a minefield to romance at all. Just a little afraid of commitment.

Frkun

Well, what you propose is true to be much more rewarding, of course, but that would mean modifying all the scripts for the romances in order to add a true tree of posibilities. My solution was meant to fix up what is already in the game. But of course, a real relationship tree would be awesome.

Zwiebelchen

Got the same bug today. No matter what I did, Neera had the same dialog. I checked the variables afterwards and think it will still go on correctly. If this is working as intended, I think this should be changed, as it is confusing as hell.

AnotherLife

I think NPCs should make it more clear when they break up with you. For example, after some time that Neera didn't talk to me, I checked the variable and it was 3 ... I don't know why, maybe cause I dropped her from the party for a little while so Edwin could learn some spells for XP :-/

Lapetus2000

AnotherLife said:

I don't know why, maybe cause I dropped her from the party for a little while so Edwin could learn some spells for XP :-/

Yep, that would be why.
You can't drop a romanced npc from the party without killing the romance. Petrification also kills romances.

Sylph

The EE npcs wont drop romance when removed from the group. Something else must have happened.

squiddd

pardon me but I have a question about Neera romance as well.
I just arrived in underdark, and Neera came forward and talked to me" something tells me we're not in Brynnlaw". What does THAT mean? It is so confusing...

enqenq

You know, Neera CAN say things that have nothing to do with the romance :P if you're playing something she's not interested in, or she's broken up with you, it doesn't mean she's not gonna shut up the whole game.

Luigirules

Someone never saw the "Wizard of Oz"

ZaknafeinBaenre

Really sad guys. If you can't read Neera, you probably have terrible luck with women in general, cause to be honest, she's pretty much a book on the average American 16-25 yr old girl. She's telling you she doesn't care because she wants you to know that she's not jealous and doesn't care what you do (even though she totally does care). She doesn't know if you cheated on her or not, and Phaere isn't going to tell her, so unless you tell her, she just knows you spent some time alone with a sexy dark elf and is too vulnerable to show her true feelings about that. Move on. If you lose her, you lose her.

xzar_monty

What he said.

I also thought Neera was completely open there, nothing ambiguous or mysterious about her reaction, or even the wording of it. Romance definitely not over.

Senash

So in the end sleeping with Phaere does or does not break the Neera romance?

I've checked the value after said event and it's still set to '2', but I want to be sure, will I still be able to finish the romance?

Loub

Senash said:

So in the end sleeping with Phaere does or does not break the Neera romance?

I've checked the value after said event and it's still set to '2', but I want to be sure, will I still be able to finish the romance?

Yes. "2" means that the romance is consolidated and doing well and will import to ToB, "1" means flirting and "3" means it is broken.
Really, while I find Neera's questline and voice acting the best in BG2EE, her romance is very bad (although not nearly as bad as the other EE characters) - it seems like it was written by someone with no knowledge on writing, often resembling bad fan-fiction. It also seems to be Out of Character when compared to her other interactions from the game, which leads me to believe they weren't written by the same people nor that there was a significant consensus between them. The characters themselves are very one-note in their romances, a mark of an unskilled writer stuck in the romantic movement, unlike the realistic movement characteristic of the series - they don't develop at all, and merely make charname revolve around their shallowness. Just try comparing the likes of Dorn and Rasaad to Anomen or Hexxat and Neera to Viconia and you'll understand what I mean.
Take for instance Anomen - his own romantic thread is largely based on the realistic parodies of the late romantic "novels of sensibility" in a manner identical to that of Jane Austen - if Jane Austen's protagonists fought Dragons and were the antichrist - he is very similar in terms of personality and development to Fitzwilliam Darcy from her magnum opus Pride and Prejudice, in fact, his very speech pattern seems to be directly modelled after that of the early 19th century British gentleman, as are his ideas of courting and even his very fake accent (his real accent, however, resembles more that of an industrial high-class American (very similar to that of radio actors from the Roaring Twenties Los Angeles, in fact), sadly, this is only evident when he is filled with rancor, most notably when dealing with Lord Cor Delryn)

Also:

winters

As my friend says, I am dissapointment. I was counting So Badly on something more complex than original romances, and in a way I got it - EE is literally bursting with queer npcs. But it still sounds like fortune's awful giggle.
Pre-romance stuff in BGEE was quite okay (Neera, no matter her moaning, or maybe that's my soft spot for chaos mages speaking) through pretty good (depressed monks ftw) to ultimately awesome (oh, Dorn). Bc of my charname/party idea, but also aforementioned rough-edged awesomeness I focused on the latter. Currently I'm at ToB finish and... meh. This isn't Dorn-themed thread so I'll continue this topic elsewhere once I complete the game.
Anyway. I have this awful feeling that all of new npcs' storylines and their romances don't develop, but deteriorate to the point of being ugh, just shut up. Beginnings are brilliant, all of them, backgrounds and ideas and introductions and then, uh. This realization and this topic made me rethink wasting time on Neera on my next run of BG2EE.
About Anomen. I personally despise the idea of agreeing with/to somebody's assholery in order to make him a better person in the future (bc that's exactly what happens IMO) but I agree that in proper context (meaning, romantic - Jane Austen yay) it makes sense - it's just not my kind of sense, neither I find roleplaying it amusing.

Loub

@winters‌
Honestly, I find Anomen's to be the one of the best romances in the game, second only to Viconia's, but that may be because I squee my whole way through it (I'm a Jane Austen enthusiast and researcher, so it should be quite obvious why I appreciate it) - unlike Rasaad or Dorn , who seem to UNdevelop over the course of their storylines, Anomen gets MOUNTAINS of character development to the point where his personality in the end resembles little that of the game's inception (again, very characteristic of Jane Austen).

winters

Loub said:

@winters‌
Honestly, I find Anomen's to be the one of the best romances in the game, second only to Viconia's, but that may be because I squee my whole way through it (I'm a Jane Austen enthusiast and researcher, so it should be quite obvious why I appreciate it) - unlike Rasaad or Dorn , who seem to UNdevelop over the course of their storylines, Anomen gets MOUNTAINS of character development to the point where his personality in the end resembles little that of the game's inception (again, very characteristic of Jane Austen).

Yes, UNdeveloping, my feelings exactly I might not personally enjoy Anomen's storyline but I certainly appreciate it and just cannot standall the lost opportunities to make new NPCs comparably amazing. Because the potential definitely exists and it was ultimately wasted by not even cliches - cliches aren't bad on themselves, especially in a form of references.

T2av

Rise my dead thread.. rise!

JuliusBorisov

There's absolutely no need to do that, @T2av : rising a thread without a purpose.