Oh, I do think that romance is logical. After all its purpose is to ensure the survival of the genes. It’s just that the romance algorithms and the hardware they’re running on have been hotfixed for millions of years so there are insane amounts of technical debt, that make the algorithm hard to figure out.

And in romance movies there is always a pursuer and a pursued party. And, as audience, we can clearly identify the correct behavior for the pursuer. But, if you identify with the pursued party, then these romance movies will feel like it’s all chance, because the pursued often has very little agency.

A scoring system just formalizes this behaviour. And in video games, you as a main character have all the in-game agency. A romance, that would move the agency to an NPC will feel like the “OMG it’s you, the grand champion” guy from Oblivion, or like a courier desperately trying to talk to you no matter where you are.

And I generally don’t have an issue with local LLMs in video games, but I really don’t think there is a way to make them work. Dialog trees are a really good way to give a player some control, while not overwhelming them with choice. They might work best for allowing characters to acknowledge things you have done outside their own little storylines.

And, sure, I can type in my question. But this will be clunky and imo break the flow of the game. And I really don’t want to sit infront of a computer and be talking out loud to some NPCs.