In update #3, we had some info about formation and party management.
Something I think is worth discussing. Maybe we can give the developers some more ideas to play with.
Say, if the player character is focusing on Summoner play style. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to customize formation for your summoned creatures?
This was something older games like lacked. I remember in BG1 when I walked into a greater basilisk with petrifying gaze and my animated skeletons with stone immunity was walking behind my party due to the way the default formation was hardcoded. So I had to manually manage the skeletons as a separate party (which could disappear into the fog of war if I told them to walk too far).
Something like this proposal would improve a summoner centric play style greatly, wouldn't you think?
Maybe there could be slot(s) for summoned familiar(s) as well?
Then there's formation for the main party. Let's say that we have run out of invisibility spells and only the rogue managed to stealth.
We could have his scouting position customized into the formation:
Here's a couple of additional ideas I had. What if we could customize a random field for the forward position? Every time you move the party, #3's position gets shuffled within the green field.
(I'm actually not sure what kind of use case this could be useful in. Just trowing out some random ideas to get the creativity rolling)
Or how about this alternative. We've given #3 three fixed positions, but every time we move the party his position is randomized among those three positions.
I imagine something like this is much easier to program than that green field above.
Again, not to sure how this randomization gimmick could become useful. Perhaps for summoned creatures? We typically don't care about when a summoned creature dies, or when their spell duration simply run out.
So maybe the randomization could be useful as a redundancy mechanism?
In this situation the formation could become vulnerable if Summon 1 and Summon 2 dies. Very critical positions. But luckily Summon 5 and Summon 6 could take their place.
What do you guys think about all these ideas?
Please do suggest something better if you think of something. Or maybe think up some more interesting use cases.