Is Ydwin a Companion or Sidekick?

[SubRosa]

The wiki says she is a Sidekick. But it also says that Sidekicks do not count toward the 5 member limit in your party. I just recruited Ydwin, with myself and four Companions (Eder, Aloth, Xoti, and Serafen) and the game forced me to boot one of my other Companions to make room for her. So I am wondering if she got upgraded to Companion with the expansions? Or is this a bug?

I am using version 5.something, with all the dlcs. This is my first time playing the game.

[xzar_monty]

Sidekick. Sidekicks do count toward the 5 member limit. You can only ever have 5 members at the same time.

[Haljamar]

2 hours ago, SubRosa said:

The wiki says she is a Sidekick. But it also says that Sidekicks do not count toward the 5 member limit in your party. I just recruited Ydwin, with myself and four Companions (Eder, Aloth, Xoti, and Serafen) and the game forced me to boot one of my other Companions to make room for her. So I am wondering if she got upgraded to Companion with the expansions? Or is this a bug?

I am using version 5.something, with all the dlcs. This is my first time playing the game.

As the person above me stated she counts as part of the only 5 people per group. Unless you hit up the Nexus, and get the expanded party mod.

[Boeroer]

3 hours ago, SubRosa said:

The wiki says she is a Sidekick. But it also says that Sidekicks do not count toward the 5 member limit in your party.

Can you show me the wiki entry? It is clearly wrong and I want to edit it. I can only find this passage here:

wiki said:

Sidekicks
There are also six sidekicks that can join your party. Sidekicks are a new character type that sits somewhere between a companion and a hired-adventurer in terms of depth of detail. Sidekicks give you more options as to who can join your party - though they don't expand the current party cap of five.

Edited May 19, 2020 by Boeroer

[Elric Galad]

I strangely remember something like this too but I can't remember from where this idea comes from. Fig Campaign ? Even maybe another game ?

[AeonsLegend]

Can't find this on gamepedia nor fextralife. Sidekicks are just companions with less interaction.

[Boeroer]

1 hour ago, Elric Galad said:

I strangely remember something like this too but I can't remember from where this idea comes from. Fig Campaign ? Even maybe another game ?

My quote above is from the wiki which has a reference to a fig campaign update. So I don't think it was the fig campagin. I suspect it was only misreading, but if there is such a passage in the gamepedia wiki it needs to get edited - hence a pointer to that passage would be cool.

[SubRosa]

10 hours ago, Boeroer said:

Can you show me the wiki entry? It is clearly wrong and I want to edit it. I can only find this passage here:

Ok, I must have misread that as meaning they don't count toward the 5 member limit. I was guessing that the whole reason for the 5 member limit was that you could add Sidekicks on top of that.

 

[Boeroer]

No, the reason was that Deadfire's characters have a lot more active abilites (with their own animations and VFX) than the old IE games. Especially when multiclassing. Players complained that the combat in PoE was overwhelming and that you couldn't really see what was going on - too much micromanagement and too much stuff on screen at a time. Thus Obsidian decided to reduce the amount of "stuff that's going on in combat" with several tweaks - one of them was to reduce the party size. There was also transparency of VFX effects during pause, custom AI scripts and so on. But the reduction of the party size stirred fans up the most.

[Wormerine]

Nah, sidekicks are there to give people more choices as to whom to have with the party, without having to create more fully fledged companions then they were able to. This, like "lesser" companions from BG2. 

[Guest 4ward]

poe1 was a mix of per-rest and per-encounter like now pathfinder kingmaker; as they decided for full per-encounter in the sequel that would have made it even worse for 6. In the old games micromanage was there but in a different form, the player micromanaged the movement of his characters. Specifically when abilities weren’t fully available movement compensated for that which also meant that you were doing things differently. It was an additional built-in difficulty fine-tuning which worked since the enemies/encounters were designed that way.

[SubRosa]

1 hour ago, Boeroer said:

No, the reason was that Deadfire's characters have a lot more active abilites (with their own animations and VFX) than the old IE games. Especially when multiclassing. Players complained that the combat in PoE was overwhelming and that you couldn't really see what was going on - too much micromanagement and too much stuff on screen at a time. Thus Obsidian decided to reduce the amount of "stuff that's going on in combat" with several tweaks - one of them was to reduce the party size. There was also transparency of VFX effects during pause, custom AI scripts and so on. But the reduction of the party size stirred fans up the most.

While I love PoE1, I did have that problem of not being able to see what was happening because of all the special effects going off. I would have thought the answer might be to simply tone down the vfx. Or give you the option of making them invisible with a keypress so you can see, issue orders, and then turn them back on and enjoy the show.

[Boeroer]

They did that as well: when you press pause, the VFX on the screen become translucent.

[xzar_monty]

8 hours ago, Wormerine said:

Nah, sidekicks are there to give people more choices as to whom to have with the party, without having to create more fully fledged companions then they were able to. This, like "lesser" companions from BG2. 

Surely there are no lesser companions in BG2. What do you mean by this?

[SubRosa]

8 hours ago, Boeroer said:

They did that as well: when you press pause, the VFX on the screen become translucent.

Thanks for pointing that out. I fiddled with the VFX slider in the graphics settings, and got them to turn off. It does make figuring things out a lot easier.

[SubRosa]

14 minutes ago, xzar_monty said:

Surely there are no lesser companions in BG2. What do you mean by this?

They might mean how in the Enhanced Edition you could create a custom party, rather than use the standard companions. You had to start a multiplayer game to do it though. I never tried it myself. I understand it made it ike the Icewind Dale games were, or like using the hired Adventurers in Pillars.

Edited May 20, 2020 by SubRosa

[Boeroer]

Don't really know about BG2 (I guess some companions were fleshed out more than others - I can't really remember much about Mazzy for example) - but most of the companions in BG had less content than Deadfire's Sidekicks. But there were 20 iirc, so no surprise. 

[xzar_monty]

1 hour ago, Boeroer said:

Don't really know about BG2 (I guess some companions were fleshed out more than others - I can't really remember much about Mazzy for example) - but most of the companions in BG had less content than Deadfire's Sidekicks. But there were 20 iirc, so no surprise. 

Oh yes. There is almost nothing interesting about any of the companions in BG. In my view, BG is merely a template -- the game itself is not good at all, but it established a foundation upon which many better things could be and were built. BG2 is a totally different thing.

[AeonsLegend]

VFX too overwhelming? These people must not have played games like Diablo 3

[AeonsLegend]

1 hour ago, xzar_monty said:

Oh yes. There is almost nothing interesting about any of the companions in BG. In my view, BG is merely a template -- the game itself is not good at all, but it established a foundation upon which many better things could be and were built. BG2 is a totally different thing.

Interestingly enough the main man from Obsidian was involved in creating BG1, but not BG2.... and BG2 was by far the better game.

[Boeroer]

4 hours ago, AeonsLegend said:

VFX too overwhelming? These people must not have played games like Diablo 3

You don't steer a party in Diablo. It's the stuff from 6 or 5 party members that fill up the screen at the same time which makes it difficult to tell what's going an. Also because the combat mechanics are much more complicated than in an Action RPG and you have to pay attention to what enemies do, when your guys' recovery is over and so on.

4 hours ago, AeonsLegend said:

Interestingly enough the main man from Obsidian was involved in creating BG1, but not BG2.... and BG2 was by far the better game.

Huh?
James Ohlen was the lead designer in both games and thus might have had the biggest impact on all design decisions. 
Feargus Urquhart (whom you mean with "main man from Obsidian" I assume) was President of Black Isle (which was the RPG development team of the publisher Interplay). Black Isle didn't develop neither BG nor BG2. That was Bioware. Bioware got assigned by Interplay (but was no part of it). Black Isle developed PS:T, IWD and IWD2. Feargus supervised the development of BG as well as BG2 for Interplay while it was done by Bioware (for Interplay).
Here's a quick schematic representation:



By the way: whatever one thinks of Feargus: he was the one who suggested to use Bioware's tech-demo engine "Battleground Infinity" for D&D CRPGs. Which they did then with great success for all games that I mentioned above. Without Feargus they would most likely not have been made (that way).

Edited May 20, 2020 by Boeroer

[AeonsLegend]

Wait I always thought Black Isle was involved in development of BG1 and not 2... where did I get that from?

[Wormerine]

17 hours ago, xzar_monty said:

Surely there are no lesser companions in BG2. What do you mean by this?

Lesser in content dedicated to them. 

[xzar_monty]

6 hours ago, Wormerine said:

Lesser in content dedicated to them. 

But there aren't any, at least in my view. Which would you argue have less content?

[Wormerine]

Mazzy, Valygar, Nalia, Korgan, I think even Minsc would count. Essencially, any companion without a romance, has far less content then the those that do, and there are some, like Mazzy or Valygar or Nalia who have little to do outside quest they are tied to.