Hello,
It pains me a bit to hear that we'd be treating the single player as inferior to the multiplayer since exactly the opposite applies. However - we are trying to do things different - and that obviously is not always a straight path so I think I can see where LC is coming from.
I personally love that I can take control of a character, split him from my party, and go do shenanigans away from the rest of my party, including interacting with npcs. I don't think this hurts the single player at all - on the contrary - I think it's really cool feature that no other game has. I also love that thinking of which party member might be the best to handle a certain situation has a lot of gameplay value. I don't consider that micromanagement at all. There really are a lot of situations in the game where this gives you advantages.
That said - there are a couple of things that aren't in there yet and I think they may go a long way to address the problems LC has (at least, I hope). First off, in single player, your main character gets the "avatar" tag. It's invisible for now but it is there. Only a character with an avatar tag gets an origin quest activated i.e. If you recruit red prince and had Lohse as your avatar, then red prince's origin quest won't be active. You will be able to interact with the world when controlling Red Prince as a party member, they'll recognise him as Red Prince, but you'll never get his specific origin quests. That's now already the case and if it's isn't in a particular instance, that's a bug, not a design decision.
What's not the case yet is the companion specific scripting and the party relation dialogs. In the example I gave, in the final game you'll won't be able to control the reactions Red Prince has in party reflection or decision dialogs (except if you play a multiplayer game on your own). But currently you can and I understand that's not cool. But that's going away.
Likewise, Red Prince's origin quest will be something that he'll talk about as a problem he has and which the party can help in, but you won't handling from his point of view. In that sense, it'll feel more than what you're used to.
Rest assured, this particular topic is something that we discuss a lot about so I really appreciate the feedback. If you don't feel like an avatar, it's normal for the moment, but it certainly isn't our intention to keep it that way. It will take us some time to put all components in so you'll have to have some patience. We'll only put in party relations and companion reactions once everything is 100% solid but it is coming. Once that is done I think you'll have a game where in SP you'll feel more like your avatar is the hero but where you still have the ability to split up your party and have meaningful interactions in the world and use that to your advantage. Personally I think that's pretty cool and a lot of fun.
Cheers,
Swen
