She’s Right Here, Sofia! Tandem Play and On-Screen Romance 

“I didn’t mean to flirt with you.”

I’ve played video games for a very long time–perhaps since the earliest days of the post-E.T. catastrophe. I was fortunate to be one of the few to go SEGA over Nintendo and thus, my earliest days of non-player characters leaned more towards Alis Landale rather than Link and many other long-forgotten SEGA and related franchises. Later, I moved on to Aeris Gainsborough on my PlayStation and various other NPCs and relationships. In nearly every case, any sense of romance on-screen was decidedly between the characters in their own universe: Alis and Lutz or Aeris and Cloud, and it was interesting-but-not critical to most storylines and play experience. And so it was for most of the RPGs that I played. Perhaps I wasn’t paying much attention to the love that was going on (certainly Link and Zelda had their ups and downs, as did Solid Snake and Meryl, Mario and Princess Toadstool, and countless others that escape me at the moment). 

And cue up Fallout 76. A game that impacted me more than I’d usually think – driving me to think more deeply about my then-home in West Virginia to guiding much of my current scholarship on how people form a sense of place for digital gameworlds. On these and so many more dimensions (as I write this, I’m already preparing for the second season of the Fallout television show), the series has mattered to me and many, many others. 

But the one I never expected was the awkwardness between myself, my partner, and a certain Commander Sofia Daguerre–my in-game and in-C.A.M.P. (your base) companion who made it quite clear a few hours into our quest line that she wanted so much more out of our relationship. One that I was mostly focused on gathering resources and earning in-game perks and points, while Sofia … wanted more than I can give. 

For some background, the Fallout series has experimented with in-game affinity systems, starting with more basic personality perks as far back as Fallout 3 (“Lady Killer” and “Black Widow” perks that allowed you to charm NPCs in dialogue) and then Fallout: New Vegas moving past gender binaries. Fallout 4 was unique in that players could engage between 10 different NPCs with their own subplots, depending on how close players got–romanticaly speaking–to those characters. 

For Fallout 76, the introduction of NPCs itself was quite interesting because it very much ran afoul of the game’s original design. Indeed, Version 1.0 of Fallout 76 had no NPCs because the player themselves (and any other players online, which admitted was not very many in the beginning) was intended to be the only human inhabitants of Appalachia. As the bombs had fallen only 25 years prior, the human player was the first to “come to the surface” and try to rebuild.

Players didn’t quite get the intended loneliness of the original release (it’s a wasteland, after all), and NPCs were added later to “flesh out” the gameworld. As part of this expansion, an “Ally” mechanism was added that allowed players to form bonds with as many as 20 different others. Essentially, players opened up their C.A.M.P.s to Allies and in return, they got customized dialogue and access to various other missions and resources.

Pretty basic, right? 

Possibly … unless you’re not the only person playing. And if you’re already spoken for. 

It’s clear that the Ally system was written with an assumption that there’s one player and one NPC. Key to enjoyment and appreciation of RPGs (as with many video games) is that they invite players into the narrative space, and give them choices that matter. For sure, player-character bonds can make game worlds feel authentic and engaging. Yet, while RPGs like Fallout 76 aren’t really designed with couch co-op in mind, it’s one of those games that is perfect for tandem play where multiple people play at once. This is how my partner and I play video games: we chat through the in-game decisions and progress as a team, sharing everything from character creation to narrative progression. 

Cue Sofia. 

During one of the game’s many, many, many “come across a signal” missions, we camecome across an abandoned bunker with an astronaut in it. She’s wounded, and with the help of a stim-pack (which the player nearly always has in their inventory), Sofia is back to health. It turns out that she has been in space during the entire war, and recently crash-landed in a very different Appalachia: one that is–nuked and destroyed beyond recognition. Through a series of missions (which we won’t spoil here), the player helps Sofia understand who she is, what happened while she’s gone, and how to survive in the new Appalachian wasteland. Decisions are made and the game goes on. So long as the player leaves the console installed at their C.A.M.P., Sofia remains as a constant companion. 

But in all of this, certain dialogue trees can get decidedly more intimate than others. For example, Sofia can be mostly informative–letting the player know about item drops and objectives. But then, after returning from some of those missions, we get: 

• I’m glad to see you’re back, though I do always like watching you walk away, too.
• I love how you look at me when you return from a successful mission.
• Mm, look at that swagger. Must have been a successful run, hmm?

And here’s where the story gets a wee strange. After all, although my partner and I while we do tandem play Fallout 76the video game, it’s also the case that I’ll often play alone. Especially for the various level-grinds, difficult missions, or other not-so-integral- to- the- plot missions that might not require tandem input into the game. Some of that invlovesthat? Probably involving Sofia and her many daily missions, my replies, and her replies to my replies, and my replies to her replies. 

Which was fine, until a few spicy lines had my partner wondering just how much our relationship with Sofia had grown in some rather awkward ways. I don’t know if it was this one or this one, but the dialogues didn’t spark the usual “what should I reply with.” Rather, they sparked more of a what have you two been doing while I was gone look. 

Frankly, I’m not even sure. But it was awkward. And so, I told Sofia that I didn’t mean to flirt with her. She replied in a way that … well, it makes me unsure if she’s okay with it all. 

Looks like I might have two relationships to mend. =/ 

NOTE: We haven’t played Fallout 76 much anymore since then, but we had nearly 400 hours into the game before all of this.