That's what Larian wrote about how inner-party relationships and
persuasion in SP will work in DOS 2 during the kickstarter campaign:
While this is all very cool, we did make sure that your main character still remains special. If the advanced relationship system gets in, then you’ll be able to roleplay the relationship options from the viewpoint of your main character, but not from the viewpoint of your companions. That ensures your relationship decisions feel weighty and that you can’t manipulate your companions.
The same goes for persuasion. Persuasion dialogs pop up whenever members of the party have different opinions. We obviously have a large range of persuasion options available in multiplayer and each party member will have its say. In single player however these options will not appear. Instead, the companions will state what they they think is the right course of action depending on their own beliefs and perhaps also the relationship with the main character.
That means that in inner-group dialogues we can only and exklusively use our main player character. The rest of your party is controlled by the AI during these dialogues and decision situation. While I really like this approach (I personally would like the whole game in SP would function like that) there is a dissent between thenarrative approach and the currently implemented gameplay approach. In DOS 1 inner-party decisions were no mere numbers game, they depended on a game on rochambeau. Social skills gave you a better chance of winning, but winning was never sure. It felt like your companions had a real saying in your decisions which actually catered to the "I narratively only play with one character" experience, especially after the EE update with AI-controlled character traits. But in DOS 2 the game of rochambeau is no more. Everything depends on numbers and so does your persuasion ability. For coop MP that's perfectly fine since it's up to you whether you invest more points in persuasion or in something else, always closely monitoring what you coop partners do (it has a real game theory vibe). But in SP you control every gameplay aspect for your whole party and especially how each character is levelled up and how they spend their abilitiy points. It's up to you whom in the party you give more points in persuasion. So there is simply no real chance to only control one character through the narrative in a believable way if you can always trick the odds by spending persuasion points. You can make your own character unbeatable in group dicussions by giving him 5 points in persuasion and everybody else 0, sure. But that way you just trick the system in the most unimmersive way possible, depending on hard numbers and the obvious dissent between narrative approach and gameplay design. Point is, if you want to solve that issue in a believable way you have to roleplay all four characters in your party up to a certain degree which is exactly what people (like myself) complained about in DOS 1 - and which is exactly the reason why Larian came up with the AI-controlled character traits. But the dissent between manual social skills points for everybody by the player and the narrative concentration on the main player character was never fully solved and I really hoped that DOS 2 would do better here. With the (hopefully still) coming relationship system that is completely catered to only the main player character in SP there would even be a new dissent between two divergent way of narrative control and roleplaying. At one point you only control your main player character and at another point you roleplay all your characters, spending points on their social skills like persuasion, changing the way how the whole party interacts in the future. That really doesn't sit right with me and it's imo a huge blow to immersion.
I think Larian has to really overthink he whole persuasion system and how dialogues within the group and during decisions should actually work in SP, because right now it's imo pretty much a mess with no consistent design and no clear vision.
My (new, slightly different) suggestion is that lucky charm, loremaster and bartering (which means, all active, gameplay related abilities) should still be group based. The highest individual value is set as the group value (every chained character belongs to the active group).
But persuasion should be an AI-controlled ability for your companions which means that the AI controls its value when you level up. You can only put points in persuasion for your own player character. That way both the dissent between narrative and gameplay and the dissent in the narrative itself would be solved (or at least vastly improved). Or maybe persuasion as an active social ability should be ditched completely. Just give every character and companion and pre-defined persuasion score. Something like that was honestly already mentioned by Larian themselves during the quote at the beginning of this post.
In single player however these options will not appear. Instead, the companions will state what they they think is the right course of action depending on their own beliefs and perhaps also the relationship with the main character.
If I read that correctly persuasion in SP is pretty much ditched once the love and hate system is implemented ("own beliefs and relationships" instead of "persuasion"). I'd really love to know what Larian has to say about that now...
