Noone here, including me have the credentials to say how hard (and how easy) is to implement a feature.
I would argue that the only people that have the "credentials" on that subject are the Larian team themselves, given that they know what is required to add more features to their engine, or what it would take to rework things to meet your request.
When I say "it's easy" to implement something like this it's because I already played games and I know this is possible.
But by your own logic, you don't have the "credentials" to say that such a thing is easy or even possible to implement within the time between now and release, right?
That kind of thinking is a logical fallacy though. You don't need credentials to make logical assumptions based on time, experience with the game and development progress, and rationality.
They are adding a GM mode.I mean really? That is huge...
It's not a leap from DOS1, it's a space jump foward.
GM mode seemed like a reasonable outcome to me, mainly because such a thing most likely existed in some form as an editor they used to create content for the game itself. Tweaking it and adding things to make it a viable as a mode for players was just a wonderfully creative idea.
Again, thats a workaround, not a proper feature / solution.
...I get your point Raze, so...what happens to our companions we don't use in the party?
...Theres a lot of possibilitys when it comes to this. Bring new ideas.
I think there's some inherent limitations in the way the party system works right now, specifically with player characters. Try it yourself: Host a game, and connect 3 other instances to it and make 4 characters.
Now disconnect the other 3 players, and play is as a singleplayer game. Maybe you eventually want to dismiss one of the player-created characters and recruit an origin party member. Unfortunately, you can't. Where would the player character go anyway? Even worse, if one of the player characters was an origin character, dialogue is bugged with them. You can't dismiss them.
There's a lot of problems that need to be addressed to make new player characters seamlessly able to drop in and out of the host's world:
(Note: Nesting lists within lists doesn't seem to work, so I'm using quotes to make it easier to read)Potential Issues to Solve:- Where are disconnected player characters located? Can the host keep using them when the client disconnects?
- How do you store disconnected characters in the save file?
- How do you handle potential save bloat from a large amount of stored player characters?
- How do you manage extra characters? Can the delete them? What does the UI for that look like? Is it all in-game dialogue, or a menu?
- Are these extra characters physically in the world? If so, what happens if there are more characters than there is world space?
- If you don't store these extra player characters in a save file, how do you sync up quest progression, items/xp the client player got, and so on?
- How will scaling be balanced?
- Do you just flat reduce vitality/damage values?
- How do you know that a level 10 character, at level 5, went mostly Wits/Memory, and only grabbed some Con in the last ~2 levels or so?
- Do you just reduce the resulting stats (health/damage/armor) and leave the attributes untouched? So a reduced level 5 character has the memory slots of a level 10?
- How about spells? Do you lock off spells that were achieved much later in the game? How do you begin to track what's acceptable to have at a previous area, given the RNG of some of the container loot.
- What about source points? Does the character joining in keep all of their accumulated source points? What if they were an end-game character?
- How about items? Can a character dump all the items from their world?
- Can characters you carry over/import be origin story characters?
- Can there be duplicates?
- How do you deal with conflicting origin story characters? Do they share quest progress? What if 2 are playing at the same time?
- How do you handle duplicate origin characters triggering the same quest events at different times?
- How do NPCs store attitude values for characters with the same origin?
- How do you begin to plan, execute, and test all of this 3 months from release, when you're still working on polishing up the rest of the game (fixing bugs, balancing everything, etc)?
As you can see, just logically working it out reveals a lot of problems that need to be solved, and I don't even know how things work behind the scenes, programming-wise.
For all I know, there's inherent limitations in just the way all this data is stored in the save file, and untangling it to somehow transfer and store it in someone else's save file results a huge mess.
Something like this is usually easier to plan and implement near the beginning of development, as it could affect the way you design saving, NPC interaction, quest progression, stat balancing, loot impact, and so forth.
This is also why multiplayer is usually better planned and implemented when development starts, instead of at the end, as designing your systems around the idea is more efficient, and creates less problems down the road, than trying to cram it into an already built system.
Consequently, that doesn't stop modders from working out the problem on their own, and finding a way to implement it (as evidenced by multiplayer mods for single player games).
