>>1125037
>Mass Effect ruined an otherwise promising thing.
In hindsight, not really. Romance ultimately gravy to a game at best unless you have highly unrealistic scope or dedicate a majority of a game to it specifically (like I dunno, a VN). They can give you mechanical benefits like what
>>1125083 said, some altered dialogue, maybe a bonus scene after the credits roll, but trying to tie entire alterations to it introduces a bunch of complications:
>how many story beats is this character involved with that we have to check for?
>Accounting for players that don't bother with romance, will we basically have extra routes to work on?
>What if you fuck up the romance, will we have to account for THAT too?
Brushing these sorts of things off can cause the romance to feel "disjointed" from the rest of the story - especially if it's meant to touch upon core aspects of the character that will be story-relevant later. This results in writing snafus like learning a lesson only to entirely forget it because a key turning point is predicated on that flaw, gating romance points and spoiling the player on later events, awkwardly dancing around the plot by putting the story in a "white room", so we're talking having zany chase antics when someone's dad just died dramatically (Fire Emblem's supports run into this a lot).