endtherapture said:
With RPG games nowadays, parties seem to have vanilla members and you will most likely "collect" all party members. I went through both Dragon Age games,ending up with a party where I didn't miss out of any of the members. They were always there at my beck and call ready to go adventuring.
I think this loses something from the old Baldur's Gate approach. In that game every had a distinct party and you had to replay the game to get everyone and play with different parties and different approaches. I miss having to carefully construct my party so people got along and didn't attack each other, balancing alignments and classes to fit my needs.
I suppose it's just a symptom of games being expensive, and developers not wanting people to miss their hard earned content by only playing a game once, but I do miss the party building of RPGs of yesterday and wish a game would return to that kind of approach rather than collecting all the NPCs and having them available when you want.
I tend to prefer games where you make an entire party right from the beginning and use it for the rest of the game. The whole "Ultima 4+" system of recruiting party members is what creates a lot of these issues to begin with.
Most of the games right now that are trying to go back to party building sort of miss a lot of the point. They tend to be based around a sort of idea that characters need to all be highly specialized, and that your pretty much playing a game with one character, but it say takes up four slots and your calling it a party. I look at say the beta of "Wasteland 2" as an example, where your pool of points is so limited that your characters can only really be good at one thing, especially if the party is going to have all the tools it needs to succeed. Compared to say the original Wasteland where you might spend hours rolling (lol) but at the end of the day your party would likely wind up where everyone was fairly decent with at least one weapon, had decent stats, and usually a specialty and typically an area where they were passable (say a backup medic to bring the regular medic back if he is injured). It felt more like a party than say playing one of Sierra's old "Gobliiins" games. But you can't be too picky, it works, and it's party based, even if it doesn't quite feel right, like each member of my team is a complete individual for whatever reason (in a lot of games characters are even more specialized, but it just feels... different, especially when your making them youself). "Divinity: Original Sin" tried it as well, but has hit similar problems, where especially with the initial difficulty (fairly old school) you need to focus your characters in very specific directions.
For the most part I think the current trend towards the whole "companion recruitment" thing is so they can create sub-plots, and fill time with the dialogue and stuff. In some games this worked, especially when it was new, or there was a fairly unique setting involved, but as time goes on it tends to grate because there are only so many ways you can sit down and have the same basic conversations with the "typical hard drinking dwarven fighter" in various games (and let's be honest, it isn't a proper high fantasy game without a hard hitting, hard-drinking, dwarf on the front line) before it becomes old hat, and I feel like I'm wasting 20 minutes of my life so some voice actor can show off his dwarf voice saying the same things other voice actors have playing the same basic role, in other games. If I'm going to recruit a full party anyway, you might as well just give me say six party slots and let me just select "Race: Dwarf, Class: Fighter" and save me the song and the dance, and say use those resources towards actual game play. What was cool at first isn't that cool anymore. Especially seeing as this whole trend along with the predictable "who are the romance options" thing has snowballed in all kinds of weird directions. Don't get me wrong, romance and sex can add something to a game, but it seems like in a lot of RPGs nowadays as much or more time gets spent by the community about who you can do the horizontal bop with and less time on you know... the actual game. What's worse is I admit when I'm playing these games I probably pute a disproportionate amount of time into thinking about it myself "hmmm, well when I navigate these conversation options, will saying this cost me options later, or perhaps lead to something unexpected". For example in DA:O being *NICE* to Zevran pretty much puts you on a romance path with him, I think even The Escapist mentioned this as being terrible in at least one article... "I decided not to be dismissive or rude to the guy, and three conversations later I'm rolling around naked with the dude...". It's nice to say make a party and you know... not worry about all the dynamics some time.
