4 réponses à ce sujet

[JDALFONSO]

I've been a fan of this series since DAO and have done so many playthroughs of all the games that I've probably played through every possible permutation of character dialogue. I love it. The companion system and the layers that it brings to the story are, in my opinion, the best part of the Dragon Age series. That got me thinking, what if they kicked it up a notch? 

 

One of the more annoying parts of the games for me has been trying to create a team that dominates in battle and is also populated by characters that I really like. We all have probably had that thought, "i want to have Iron Bull in my party, but he's too squishy as a Tank on Nightmare," or something along those lines.

 

What if for DA4 they kick up the companion system to the next level, by letting us customize our companions? 

 

For example, Imagine if you were doing the "Finding the Warden Quest" and the quest started in a tavern where an NPC starts talking to you. This NPC is preprogrammed to tell you rumors about the default character state of the Warden Character. 

 

Example:

 

NPC says: "I heard the Warden was a broad chested man with a beard."

 

At that point you could respond by saying A: "I heard the Warden was an elf." B: "I thought the Warden was a Dwarf" C: What else have you heard? 

 

The options in the dialogue would continue until you created the Warden that you wanted for your team. You could pick their race, sex, origin story (such as City Elf or Dalish), with enough tinkering you could pick their sexuality so you could choose if they were potential romantic interests for your character. 

 

Their companion quests would be designed to change based on the decisions you made, but certain things wouldn't change, such as whether they are a mage, rogue or warrior, or their specialization. As long as they create limits, such as not allowing you pick Dwarf for a character that is a Qunari (because there are no known Dwarves that have converted to the Qun in the DA Cannon, (same thing for mages), i think this could be done very well and would multiply the replayability of the game exponentially.

 

Imagine replaying inquisition with Blackwall as a Surface Dwarf who is really a Legion of the Dead member who took the name Blackwall, instead of Tom Rainier, or Iron Bull being a City elf who was raised in the Qun who wears a horned helmet and is missing an eye or Sera as a Dwarf who was kicked out of Orzrimar and adopted by a Ferelden lady instead of an Orlesian lady.

 

Just a thought. Hope someone at Bioware reads this and says, "we're going to need to higher a lot of new writers for all the extra dialogue options in DA4." lolz

[Reznore57]

They could do something like Pillars of Eternity where you can have mercenaries you can design BUT...yeah there's a massive but why would they bother?Companions are one of the main selling point of Bio Games , and they cost a lot .

Cost of voice acting , the more choices you have with companions (romance , friendship, hate , if they can die or not , if they are involved in the plot or not etc ) the more ressources they require.

So suddenly you throw all this out of the window and go here don't bother have those random mercenaries and have fun!

 

And there's little point in creating mercenaries and giving options to choose some random personality , I mean you could do something but it'd have to be very basic like maybe the MP characters.A flavor text about their past/personality , a few banters and battle cries here and there.

But again I don't see the point.

[nightscrawl]

I agree with what Reznore said, and will add.

 

You say you like the companions, OP. But part of what makes them so great is that they are fixed entities and the writers are able to design a robust, layered character because of that. This includes voice acting, character design, cinematics, romance options, backtstory, and everything that goes into these characters that makes them such a huge draw for the series. Your method would see them as mere shadows of what he have now. I also dislike the idea of giving the player such control of these types of character in a story driven game. These aren't henchmen that you can pick up in a tavern, these are fully fleshed out characters.

[JDALFONSO]

I hear what both of you are saying. I think a good middle ground would be having the kind of control i am proposing for a single companion in the game, not all of them. The mercenary idea is kind of cool. I was hoping the protagonist of the next game would start off as something like a mercenary that grows into a warlord. So i'm totally down for that.

[Nimlowyn]

I agree with Reznore and nightscrawl and will add:

 

Dragon Age is a story driven series known for its characters. If we can customize companions to this extent, how are they going to account for all the variables from one installment to the next? It can be a headache enough for one character and their decisions, let alone the various permutations when you can make, essentially, custom companions. Not only is that a logistical nightmare (if not an outright impossibility for the kind of series Dragon Age is), as nightscrawl says, to make a strong narrative with strong characters you need fixed entities. 

 

I'm afraid I don't see this working or, desirable, frankly.