Companion as a concept, rather than a class?

[rjshae]

What do you think of the idea of one or more of the companions being developed as a general personality concept, rather than being focused on a specific class?

 

For example, a companion could be a mentally-scarred refugee from a city slum, seeking justice and vengeance for a heinous crime committed against his family and neighbors. However, he may have arrived at this point as a street thug rogue, a brawling fighter, or even a wild-child barbarian. Thus the companion would have a class selected from a limited set (depending on the PC type), but his portrait, persona, and even many of his stats could be about the same.

 

Another example could be a scholarly younger son from a wealthy family who was expected to join the local covenant brotherhood, but instead may have revolted against his family and elected to become a wizard, cipher, or even a bard.

 

Just curious really...

[Hormalakh]

This might actually work. It might be difficult to write for though. But, in general, I don't see why any certain personality predisposes to any certain class. Unless their experiences as that class have played a part in forming their personality.

 

As an example, I still don't really know what class Minsc was from BG2. All I know is, he could rage and was a pretty good fighter. He could've been a barbarian, a ranger, or a fighter or even a really dumb paladin (which I guess makes him Lawful Good).

Edited November 30, 2012 by Hormalakh

[Osvir]

I think that companions should "live their lives"/follow their quest tree. I've played this scenario before:

 

You get to Nashkel, you meet Minsc, but instead of getting him you just ignore him. Later on you meet Minsc and Dynaheir in Baldur's Gate, and they've progressed. Heck, maybe Minsc didn't succeed in saving Dynaheir (based on a global dice roll) and you only meet a worn and torn down Minsc at the bar. Maybe Minsc did succeed but he had to sacrifice himself for Dynaheir's survival (global dice roll).

 

In P:E, perhaps that Chanter you didn't take into your group dies because you didn't grab him. Or that Wizard, Aloth perhaps, becomes evil and a villain if you don't take him into your group. Forton could become a beggar or merely a man meditating in the streets.

 

Perhaps they could be an entirely different class. Maybe Edair is on his way to become a Paladin, but if you grab him he'll stay a Fighter, and if you don't you'll meet a zealous Edair who is now a Paladin. Maybe Cadegund becomes enslaved, and gets to "work it off" at a Jabba the Hutt-representative.

 

Global dice rolls! :D

[AGX-17]

So you're just saying companions should have randomly decided classes based on their backstory? Unless the characters have possible variables in their backstory it doesn't make sense for them to have variable classes. All that really seems to do mechanically is throw additional uncertainty about what resources you'll have available into the game. It might add to replay value, but I don't like the idea of having to forego an interesting companion and create a generic Adventurer companion because the game rolled that character a class that's incompatible or redundant with my current party.

 

There's also the small, niggling issue that all the revealed companion characters have had their classes defined already.

Edited November 30, 2012 by AGX-17

[rjshae]

^^^^

Mmm, not exactly. I had more in mind something complementary to the PC's class and persona. So if you take a Rogue, the city refugee becomes a duelist fighter rather than a thuggish burglar. But Osvir's suggestion also makes sense; the type of character you meet can vary depending on when you meet him or her. I just think it would add replay value to not always meet exactly the same cast of characters.

Edited November 30, 2012 by rjshae

[Karkarov]

No. I am not Gary Stue, even if I am the main character of the game the universe does not revolve around me and I should be plenty capable of making mistakes or dealing with NPC's who just won't go my way on things. NPC's classes should be chosen based on history, personality, and all that. But it should be the class the NPC choose, not the one the game choose to make that NPC fit better with my character.

[Sylvius the Mad]

^^^^

Mmm, not exactly. I had more in mind something complementary to the PC's class and persona. So if you take a Rogue, the city refugee becomes a duelist fighter rather than a thuggish burglar. But Osvir's suggestion also makes sense; the type of character you meet can vary depending on when you meet him or her. I just think it would add replay value to not always meet exactly the same cast of characters.

If there's flexibility in the character's class, the player should be able to choose the class explicitly.

 

But I also like the idea of companions not collected continuing on to do their quests themselves.

[rjshae]

No. I am not Gary Stue, even if I am the main character of the game the universe does not revolve around me and I should be plenty capable of making mistakes or dealing with NPC's who just won't go my way on things. NPC's classes should be chosen based on history, personality, and all that. But it should be the class the NPC choose, not the one the game choose to make that NPC fit better with my character.

So you're looking at it more as an alternate reality... rather than a game? What I'm suggesting is that a NPC concept is not rigidly bound to follow a particular path, and that the NPC's path is chosen to give you a different, yet balanced experience based on the class you choose. It's mainly a concept for replay value rather than pure simulation for its own sake.

[Alexjh]

I think if they were going to implement something like this, it'd have to vary from character ti character and to not that great a degree and within limitations. Obviously a character has to function in the same rules, and if the player is going to be able to level them up (more or less a foregone conclusion, as was a recurring infinity engine thing) it wouldn't make sense to have an entirely different way of setting up a character for the party members.

 

What I would say is that I would allow some characters to multiclass while others would not be able to: from a roleplaying perspective, it's probably fairly unlikely that a quiet reserved monk character should get to multiclass to a barbarian, but perhaps a front-line fighter who is a bit rough might be able to go towards barbarian, paladin, rogue, ranger or perhaps even some of the more martial cleric disciplines. So I'd say, perhaps just give each of the companions a preset bunch of classes they can go towards, with the options ranging from lots to none depending on the character.

 

If you are going to have the player effect the backstory of a character before you meet them, that should be the only way to do it rather than just random origins on a dice role, because to do the examples as pitched in the original post would mean writing loads of alternate dialogue effectively for different throws of a lucky dip. On the flip side, if it ties to the plot, say, whether you save a village earlier in the game or not, and you later meet a guy from there as either a fighter (having saved the village, he trained up as a solider) or ranger (as a refugee was forced to live off the land) it could create a lot of replayability.

[Hormalakh]

I'm thinking this is coming about because of the whole BG1 Imoen thing, but I could be wrong. My thinking is that the whole purpose is that if you want to pick up a character because you like their personality, you don't want to drop them because you already have enough of that class in your party.

 

One way of dealing with this "holy trinity" issue (i.e. every party needs variable skills to survive) is to make classes less rigid in skill specialization.

 

Another way is to allow companions to differ in class assignment, so that if you really like Forton as a character (scoff) and you are already a monk, you can choose for him to be a thief instead, so you still have him and he still plays a worthwhile role in your party.

[Kronos]

It's a good concept. I agree with Alexjh somewhat on this in that the classes would need some really tight limitations on what can and can't be done.

 

Perhaps another interesting idea is that as you interact in the world and with a companion, certain dialogue options and stituations/conflicts in the world will perhaps move a NPC's personality in certain directions which can affect class. eg: Aloth could have several conflicts in the game world where he shuns the use of magic to skewer enemies on the end of that nifty sword of his or where he decides to influence a situation by getting inside someones head and by 'persuading them' to simply let you and your party walk into that restricted area. These sorts of choices could potentially affect the personality of Aloth going forward and potentially make him lean more towards the fighter or cipher class. The personality repercussions of these choices should be felt on a continuing basis hence leading him to be more brash or manipulative depending on these initial choices.

 

The following outcomes thus occur:

1: Aloth adopts a slighty different personilty depending on which options you've chosen.

2: Aloth becomes either a pure wizard, fighter/wizard or cipher/wizard depending on your choices.

 

This way you can have a slightly different experience with companions and also have them fill differing roles in you team; which allows for cool new interactions on different playthroughs.

 

Well there's my 2 cents worth.

Edited November 30, 2012 by Kronos

[jezz555]

It could work, but I don't really see the point and I'm opposed to it to be honest. A character becomes more complete if their class is engrained into their concept and there is no other way they could have turned out. The companions are set up so that there is one of everything also, and this kind of throws that off. If you want to create your own party you can do that, but I don't see the sense in doing things this way.

Edited November 30, 2012 by jezz555

[TMTVL]

I played through BG2 without any clerical assistance a couple of times 'cause I don't like Viconia, and Korghan and Edwin don't like Aerie. If you're patient and willing to spend a lot of time making sure you can survive without a certain type of character, you can get some odd parties through any game.

 

The main question is how important class is a a character defining concept, think of Kelgar in NWN2, who can go from Fighter to Monk. It seems a pretty big deal. If classes are as important in P.E., it'd probably take a lot for someone to change class.

 

But I dunno, I guess we'll hear about it in the future.

[Brother Pain]

I actually like the idea of varying character classes. It could even be just a combination of flexible classes and allowing the player to level the NPC when they're picked up.

 

A lot of games with NPCs with personalities and backgrounds, expecially Bioware games, you often have to decide which characters to bring based either on their personality or what classes you're missing to have a viable party. This goes all the way back to Baldur's Gate 2 (since BG1 really had so little interaction with your companions that it hardly mattered), and is especially obvious in the Dragon Age series and even SWTOR:

 

In DA:O, not bringing Wynne (the only healer) was a really bad idea, and you really wanted all the classes present, so a lot of characters never got used. In DA2 I actually ran with an almost all rogue group even if it was incredibly ineffective, simply because I preferred certain characters and their banter. SWTOR leaves each class with every role represented (ranged dps, ranged tank, melee dps, melee tank, and ranged healer) but for a lot of classes one of those is way more optimal than the others, so you end up using Doc (the healer) as a jedi knight for example, at the detriment of much more interesting characters.

 

I'm trying to think of non-Bioware games with a similar problem, but the only games I can think of are sequels to Bioware games (NWN2 and KOTOR2) and they had the problem to a lesser extent, in NWN2 because a lot of the later characters you picked up weren't likable or interesting at all (eg. Quara and the paladin), and in KOTOR2 you could turn almost your entire team into jedi anyway. Other games simply don't have NPCs well written enough for it to matter, or have flexible enough party structure that you can play like you want and still be optimal enough. Perhaps with a non-fixed party size (eg. Fallout, Arcanum).

 

TL;DR version: Having flexible NPC classes allow me to play with a party I like without having to use party members I dislike because I need a certain class represented, such as the stoic and boring tank or the noble and boring healer.

[TMTVL]

Arcanum had a fixed party size: you couldn't have more followers then cha/4, minus one for Educator, plus one for training in persuasion. Except for the followers that don't count towards your limit (dog), or creations/summons/mind controlled slaves.

 

Also, you don't HAVE to take certain party members because of their class. It's not a sin to lower the difficulty and playing a game is more about having fun then about being the best at it.

[Agelastos]

This might actually work. It might be difficult to write for though. But, in general, I don't see why any certain personality predisposes to any certain class. Unless their experiences as that class have played a part in forming their personality.

 

As an example, I still don't really know what class Minsc was from BG2. All I know is, he could rage and was a pretty good fighter. He could've been a barbarian, a ranger, or a fighter or even a really dumb paladin (which I guess makes him Lawful Good).

 

He was supposed to be a Rashemi barbarian, but because there was no Barbarian class in BG1 they made him a ranger instead and then just added the Rage ability in BG2.

[Osvir]

It's a good concept. I agree with Alexjh somewhat on this in that the classes would need some really tight limitations on what can and can't be done.

 

I agree, but at the same time I want to challenge it. If Forton is a Monk and strongly believes in being a Monk, perhaps the game takes a turn where you make him physically ready/equipped to be a Fighter. This could also change his personality. Wall of text could possibly be something? (15-16th Nov)

 

If you are a Cipher, could you dominate your companions? Could you force companions, and your own character, into different roles and thus also altering not only their abilities but subtly and elegantly altering their personalities, in a purposeful way.

 

The purpose, simplified, is to give immersion that the character grunts originally one way and grunts differently the other way.

Edited December 1, 2012 by Osvir

[Brother Pain]

Arcanum had a fixed party size: you couldn't have more followers then cha/4, minus one for Educator, plus one for training in persuasion. Except for the followers that don't count towards your limit (dog), or creations/summons/mind controlled slaves.

 

Also, you don't HAVE to take certain party members because of their class. It's not a sin to lower the difficulty and playing a game is more about having fun then about being the best at it.

 

Also, Arcanum should have been mentioned as having less interesting characters, mostly because they hardly had any worthwhile dialogue. And of course, like Fallout, it wasn't a party-based game, so going solo was just fine unless you wanted to cart around a ton of gear to sell

 

And in some games, that's true, as I said, I ran with a completely non-optimal party (Isabela, Merrill, Verric, and a rogue Hawke) in DA2 and I dumped the difficulty in that game since the combat was a bit too actiony anyway, but I actually raised the difficulty in DA:O since the combat in that game was actually fun. And you could certainly play without Wynne, it just meant much harder battles and carrying around a ton of injury kits (unless you played as a mage yourself of course).

[Kronos]

I suppose another way of looking at the question is by looking at how in the real world most people are a byproduct of their life experiences. eg: in an alternate universe or reality instead of being an engineer with a wife and 2 kids you'd become a drug dealer that got shot and killed at the age of 24. The concept being that there are a few pivotal moments in life that can in reality take a person down differing path and would affect the future personality of a person.

 

How to implement it in a game though? I don't think you'd want to change a companion's core personality, perhaps some understandable and easy to relate to class variations or multi-class opportunities.

[mcmanusaur]

Nope. Eventually you want a character way more fleshed out than simply being "something like the prodigal son archetype", and once those details are added it tends to restrict things further. So at the most I could maybe see two viable classes for certain companions, but then that's losing any kind of definition of character their build would confer. In short, devs start with such concepts but must add more detail than what you're suggesting for the characters to be interesting, and so characters are gradually fit into class roles, and for reasons better than restricting player freedom I might add. Multi-class opportunities for companions would be alright, but it should be like KOTOR where there is an elaborate quest tree one has to go through to have that development option, as opposed to just leveling them.

Edited December 3, 2012 by mcmanusaur