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[coomber]

Any changes to party approval?

[Mary Kirby]

Giltspur wrote...

Party members still react to your decision. But approval won't be handled the same way. They mentioned in the GI article that the approval ratings led to metagaming. Basically people do whatever results in the highest number rather than doing what their character actually wants to do. So getting rid of that number, assuming that's what the GI article is suggesting, seems like a good move. How they'll handle party conflict and rapport...who knows.

There's still approval. But now instead of only getting content and combat bonuses based on positive approval, you can either build a rapport or an antagonistic relationship with your companions. Negative approval means they want to show you up, or see you fall on your sorry behind, but they still stick around.

There are way fewer gifts, and the gifts are follower-specific. (No more giving dog bones to everyone to boost approval.)

And followers can still turn on you or abandon you, regardless of how much they like you, based on your actions. (Like Leliana and Wynne at the Urn.)

[Mary Kirby]

Lord Gremlin wrote...

Awww, but everybody likes good bones with a handful of meat attached to them!

Actually, I think there will be a DLC which will allow you to buy infinite universal gifts. Am I wrong?

Probably not? Gifts trigger specific dialogues now. So you give your companion that "I'm with stupid" T-shirt and they ask you what in the Maker's name you were thinking when you bought it.

[David Gaider]

dan107 wrote...
There's a key difference. Combat (and all the stats related to it) necessarily have to be abstracted. Everyone understands and accepts that. No one expects a Bioware game to be a realstic combat simulator, nor could it be, since in that case you would inevetibly end up dead after a few fights at most.

However, companion interactions are a completely different animal. Bioware games have always had a major focus on realistic, believable NPCs ("digitial actors" and all that). Adding a superflous "approval" system that does absolutely nothing but encourage meta-gaming, since it's essentially a mini-game that you can win or lose, runs completely counter to that idea. Nor does it make any sense for the most part. If you're fighting side by side and risking your life next to someone, that creates a bond unlike any other. Kicking (or worse yet, NOT kicking) a few kittens is not enough to undo that.

Then how else would you suggest we do it? In my experience you have a limited set of options if you intend for a relationship with a companion to develop inside of a non-linear storyline (and non-linear in this context means only we don't always know what order you're doing things and when they're happening, which is usually the case in our games):

1. You develop a relationship only by talking to them, and the relationship builds in a pre-set sequence of interactions.

2. You have companions react to specific events, as in 'you do X, companion reacts with Y no matter what'.

3. You track a variable whereby the companion reacts to your decisions which determines their overall disposition, without necessarily being aware of all the specific causes of the variable change (you might track a few, but you need to be wary of how many you're tracking lest they start to cross paths).

Typically we do one or two of the above. The difference with the approval system as we've implemented it in Dragon Age is that we show the feedback to you-- but feedback of some kind is required, since in a game you're not going to have access to the subtle nuances of human interaction that exist in real life. At some point you do have to recognize that this is a video game and than a mechanic of some kind is required just as with combat-- all you require is enough buy-in from the player that they are willing to suspend their disbelief. So far, I feel confident that we've been pretty successful in doing just that.

Modifié par David Gaider, 18 juillet 2010 - 09:55 .