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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8011810" data-attributes="member: 18">I think this is quite a complicated question, despite the surface simplicity.First off, memorable and interesting, whilst they can occur together, are not inherently correlated. Or at the very least a companion can be memorable without being interesting (Minsc being the obvious example).Second off, is memorable/interesting really the issue, or is likeable or engaging the main issue? I've not seen much decline in companions being memorable/interesting over the years. I have seen a decline in them being likeable, or rather, I've seen a curve. Back in BG1/2, I found most of the companions pretty irritating, because in BG1 they were broad stereotypes, and in BG2 whilst they became more real, they were mostly loud and stupid. Some were also forgettable. By the time we get to the ME games, the companions are extremely engaging, and really well-designed to pique player interest and get you to care and so on, and even when they're jerks, it's in an engaging way. The DA games were also good at this (DA2 probably was best, because, I suspect, of the fact that having an adversarial or unhealthy relationship with a companion didn't mean they left the part, but instead cooperated reluctantly).If we look at the Pillars games, most of the companions are, I think it's fair to say, memorable and interesting. They have believable and complex pasts and often have a degree of nuance and complexity to their personalities, beliefs and so on. Some even grow as people. But the problem is, a lot of them are kind of to extremely annoying. Durance is an obvious example. He's certainly both memorable and interesting, but boy is he annoying and hard to like. Even Aloth is kind of annoying. Only Eder is pretty much safely 100% not a twerp, and he's also the least complex character. This does, of course, mirror BG1/2, but maybe that was a bad thing to take from it? Pillars 2 has more fun characters, but again they can be frustrating, particularly when one of them turns out to be literally a hitman for a would-be-colonial power and can't seem to see anything wrong with that.PF:KM has very similar issues, but also has a couple of characters so bland you can forget they exist. It also basically has Durance 2.0 "This time he's a gnome and less interesting". Aforementioned gnome is particularly bad, because the writing doesn't allow you to zing him back, or give as good as you get, even if you have a higher INT and CHA, and much higher social skills (as I found out). Your character is just written as a drooling moron, which would be fine if they were, or if it was an RP choice, but all choices result in that (I'm told him improves very late on but I just gave up on talking to him, because people said the same thing about Durance, and it wasn't really true).The Outer Worlds certainly has some pretty memorable companions, and a lot of people really loved Parvati, but again it has this issue where most of them aren't very likeable.DOS1 had utterly forgettable companions. I nearly finished it and I think all I remember is one of them was mute?DOS2 had more memorable companions, but they're all twerps with no exceptions, and they're memorable without being interesting, for my money. If I could just create a party of my own design without having to deal with them, I'd prefer it, because they're really twerpy. I guess some people liked them but jeez.MEA had complex, more realistic (in some ways) companions, but most of them were either not memorable, or memorable solely for being twerps (honorable exception: Jaal).I think the underlying issue, and this seems to have hit a lot of companies, not just any one, is that there's a desire, from writers, to write more "realistic" or "believable" characters, or to simply show off their writing skills, even if it doesn't benefit the game (looking at you, gnome), and that spending too much effort making companions engaging/likeable is seen as somehow low-brow, or something. Not "real" writing, maybe. With the ME and DA games, they very much revolve around the main character, and the companions are written as if they world rotates around you to some extent, and that makes them work really well. But I think that's seen as not cool by a lot of writers, and now every companion has to be more their own person, even if that makes dull to interact with. I think it fails to account for how drama works in the context of an RPG where the player is directly controlling/RP'ing only one PC.It feels like in the ME/DA main era, the games learned from shows like Buffy/DS9, but understood that character only gets to see from the eyes of Buffy or Commander Sisko, so didn't try and ape them too closely, and centered the drama so it always made sense from that perspective. Now it feels more like most CRPGs are trying to do a Lost-esque deal where every character has their own agenda and goals, even the companions, and yet are failing to account for how that might not work out great from a player perspective.Some squad-combat games, including XCOM1/2 use option 4. I agree with your thoughts re: 1-3, but my experience with 4 is not hugely positive. As you say, it means setting up combos works really well, but equally it means things are very bursty, and can be one-sided in boring or frustrating ways. Plus it encourages bad design choices like XCOM1/2 almost-universally-loathed "pod" system to attempt to mitigate this. Gears Tactics does a better job with the same system, but the way it operates wouldn't work for an RPG. If you just applied it to 5E, well, just look at any combat where the PCs or the monsters all got higher initiative than the other. They tend to go pretty badly for whoever didn't get to go first. You can mitigate this by starting sides far enough apart, but even then it's very easy for someone to get focused and dropped once the two sides meet, and that doesn't really work well for a CRPG, where some fights will narratively need to start at close quarters.Certainly it's better than DOS' way of doing it, which always felt brutally unfair, but that's not saying much. Even XCOM Chimera takes approach 3, I note. Sure, it's an experiment, but it's clearly something the XCOM team thought might work better (it does, imho).</blockquote>

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