Some bonus material for you. I got in an e-mail exchange with the author shortly after he interviewed me for the story and for reasons of space he could obviously only work with a small percentage of what we discussed, but I thought this part of our conversation might be illuminating.
He asked me if I had been influenced at all by date sims and "hentai" games.
My response (short version was "no"
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To me, a dating sim/hentai game is just that--a game, and you need to follow some sort of specific path through it in order to "win," otherwise you "lose." ("You have to give Suki the pillow before you use the vibrator on her, otherwise she will scream too loudly and her father will come in and castrate you and blah blah blah.")
At the risk of sounding ridiculously hoidy-toidy about this, I prefer to think of romances in CRPGs as more of "an experience" than as a minigame-within-the-game. Although I don't agree with all of the components of the "Bioware approach", I think they basically got it right when they made it generally very _difficult_ to "lose the romance." 99% of the time you had to either be a dick, or extremely callous or disinterested, in order to have the romance break.
Some modders have taken a fairly complex "scoring" approach to writing a romance: such as, "If you haven't said 10 romantic things in your dialogue responses before the 12th lovetalk, or have said more than 3 callous things, or more than 5 neutral things, the romance ends and becomes a platonic friendship," which I guess is more "dating sim-like." I've never seen the appeal of doing that much housekeeping, frankly, and I would much rather see players feel free to roleplay than be constantly trying to optimize their response in order to hopefully not break the romance. That's not to say I think romance characters should be made to eat shit and like it--player lines should get unique, or at least "seemingly unique" replies from characters, and if the player chooses to cross certain lines, there should be consequences. For instance, Kelsey is generally very easy-going, but if you become the head of the Athkatlan thieves' guild, he is mortified, strongly objects, and will break off the romance unless you either change your mind or talk him down convincingly/lie to him about your true intentions. I wrote a flirt dialogue sequence for Jaheira where, if the player talks too much smack about her dead husband Khalid, she violently breaks off the relationship. But a constant scoring system just doesn't seem like much fun for anybody.
*Aside from BG2, I would actually say that my biggest influence was the Commodore 64 game Law Of the West by Accolade. You play a sheriff on his rounds in a Wild West town and have multiple-choice dialogues with different townspeople, but unless you pick a fight you can't win and get blown away, the game doesn't end simply because you chose a sub-optimal dialogue option. If you do something REALLY dumb, like kill or alienate the town doctor, then yeah, you die the next time you're shot. But you can have different interludes with characters without trying to find the absolute "right" dialogue path. It still has replay value because you can unearth different outcomes or experience a similar conversation in a different way by choosing a new method, but you're not beholden to always do A, then B, then C just to have a good time and continue the game.
If I write a romance where people are worried "Wait, wait... do I have to blow in her ear first, or do I give her the earrings first?" then I'm doing something really wrong. And I'm not really interested in getting into a Princess Maker optimizing-type depth, of "Well, if you don't rub her feet and give her a sexy nighty, then she'll still sleep with you but it will be cold, emotionless, mechanical sex." I think it's much more sensible to write a core, engaging romance storyline, which has some divergence based on the choices you make, but doesn't get caught up in "bad outcomes." I don't really think that makes for a satisfying sideline in a CRPG--players have enough trouble worrying about how they're going to win the next battle.
There's another trap you can fall into in a CRPG setting if you put things on rails too much and make it too "minigame"--you start forcing the player to play a very certain kind of character in order to complete the romance. It seems that in hentai games it's more likely that you are assigned a character and a goal ("You are Ken, a horny Honda mechanic, and it is your mission to seduce these four motor scooter riders!") and, okay, if Ken is the kind of guy who has to put a hammerlock on a girl, then I guess that's just who he is and whatever Ken has to do to get them in the sack, that's what Ken is all about, and players accept this because when they started the game they were told "You are Ken" and that's part of the deal. But if I'm letting you play this CRPG in (more or less) the style of your choosing, and then I keep grabbing you into these romantic interludes and suddenly constrain your options to a very narrow range of personality types and give you only one way to complete this romance (or three ways which all look very similar and involve a steady stream of "quick-witted-and-caustic" lines), I'm certainly not doing your immersion any favors.
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* - I actually am using a simplistic scoring system for Nalia, but I don't see doing so again any time soon.
