Married Life

[TheIronGod]

So, you folks (the devs) seem to be concerned with people perceiving marriage to an NPC as the end of the romance branch of the game. Like people will wanna just quit or start over then. But what if getting hitched 3 months into the game isn't the end? I'd be really disappointed if the game design ignored married life. Having a kid shouldn't be the only after-marriage goal.

TL;DR: If getting married in the game opens up more fun game content, people are not going to just ignore it.

Maybe you need to maintain the relationship or that NPC will want a divorce.

Perhaps your spouse will reward you with gifts you can only receive from a spouse after performing marriage quests (that's a bit devicive though and I'm not happy with myself for thinking of it, lol).

Maybe your spouse wants to run their profession from your farm and you need to expand your farm to accommodate their skills, (giving you access to whatever they do).

Let me have my spouse just follow me around the game world, maybe we can go on dates.

They could even provide little "jobs", having the player run errands.

If an MMO needs to have longer timelines for activity branches than games like Harvest Moon, extend them this way, by finding where those games had content gaps or room for more and fill that space with procedural systems that are fun, meaningful, and natural.

[Velktor]

I would love something like extra quests becoming available, either from your spouse or friends and relatives of your spouse too. Great idea.

[Eiburine]

I agree. :3 I like the jobs/errand idea. I also LOVE the date and following you around thing I dislike how in HM your spouse goes on to do their own thing and you never go with them for walks or anything XD I think interacting with them in this way would be very cute >w<

[TimeMachine]

I like all of this. I think the only thing is making sure there's a way some of the benefits (not the following around, obviously, that should be a choice XD) are available to player characters who marry other player characters. It would suck to marry your real life love or BFF in game and then realize there's a whole cool set of "marriage quests" people who married NPCs have, but no marriage quests for PC-married couples. But I definitely don't think marriage should be the end of the relationship questline.

[TheIronGod]

That's an excellent point.

I think, and people will disagree with this because you guys seem to want every character to be able to experience everything in the game, I'm actually ok with having the user's choices change their experience... that's WHY you have choices. Otherwise, choices don't even matter. I want different paths and options that make the experience different each time.

That said, the choice to marry a player could have different activities you do together or goals you work together toward in place of spouse-given quests. You could give each other gifts to increase the rating of your relationship (just like your relationship with any NPCs except you're both working on it) and, after getting it to different levels, you may get XP or unlock having a kid, expand your home, or any number of married goodies you'd get if you married an NPC. You could get souvenirs from visiting tourist locations as a couple/family or going together to romantic locations. All of that is the same as completing quests, it's just done in a way that makes it a shared activity instead of a solo one.

In short, while the structure of the activities would and should change, you wouldn't have to be short-changed any reward or items or whatever.

[TimeMachine]

I totally agree! I think it's fine for quests to be different (in fact I think mechanically they'd have to be) (and also, it'd be more fun if they were kinda different between the different NPCs you might marry as well), I just want there to be benefits to marrying PCs as well and NPCs, even though I'm more likely to go the latter route. I think what you suggest sounds great.