Comments on Hit Self-Destruct: Life Of The Party

Small parties, or parties which exist at the start...

2009-04-07T01:37:00.000+12:00

Small parties, or parties which exist at the start of the game are fine enough, as are ones which swap based on events - although all to commonly it seems forced - "ah ha, this person joined, and suddenly this other one has to leave!".

I think there are ways of having larger dynamics - it'd be an interesting game if done well. There could be ways to split up (or have AI) so micromanagement of combat wasn't required, and the party interactions could be that much deeper.

The sweet spot might be a party of 4 to 6, but there is a huge amount of unexplored territory with larger groups of interacting NPC's - although some games have had extra NPC's you can't all take along of course.

I just think the limit being imposed for nothing other then mechanical reasons is a bit silly. For instance, Baldur's Gate 2 - all the party interaction scales well enough for 6 people (covering just about every conversation combination of input) but mechanically and balance wise only allows 6, not the full complement of around 12. A real shame, since it simply requires that many more playthroughs to get everything out of it, and a lot of stuff is lost.

Maybe I just enjoy my sim games - if you like some kinds of management (but with AI to take over if you don't) more people I think is a viable route to some interesting ways of doing party behaviours.

Just because games haven't done it too eloquently so far doesn't mean they couldn't :D

I would really rather the game just took the decis...

2009-04-06T23:31:00.000+12:00

I would really rather the game just took the decision out of my hands entirely - why not have party members joining and leaving at different points of the narrative, like you point out - they MUST have lives outside of the player character's influence, so why not play to that? "I'll help you with this mission but then I need to get home to help my own people" or whatever..

Chrono Trigger notwithstanding (I've never played ...

2009-04-06T17:53:00.000+12:00

Chrono Trigger notwithstanding (I've never played it, sorry, I'm hopeless) I do agree with Gregory. A party of more than six characters gets really unwieldy and impractical, no question. I think a better solution to that though -- at least from a narrative perspective -- is not a limited amount of character slots, but only having a total pool of three/four characters to begin with. I.e., the player doesn't have "party limits" but just "a party" that happens to only have a couple of people in it.

Obsidian's Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion Mask of the Betrayer is a game that gets this so right and also completely wrong. There are only four party members, which allows the game to focus on a tight core cast without spending any time on extraneous character subplots. So that sounds okay, except the game only ever lets you take three of those four characters in your party. Party limits never seem more insane when you're always leaving behind -- and returning to collect -- one person. What's worse: the game's closing narration addresses what happens to each of your party members except for the one that you don't have in your party at the end of the game. It's really amazing to me that they overlooked that.

I found Chrono Trigger's explanation utter rubbish...

2009-04-06T10:51:00.000+12:00

I found Chrono Trigger's explanation utter rubbish - there is no reason given why when in their own time zone, there can't be 4 people in the party - the 3 from different times and the 1 from that time. Grr...silly game mechanics! I agree, I love games which allow me the full complement! Or at least keep them nearby and handy - such as in a spaceship (a half measure but good enough).

Not many do, sadly.

Obsidian isn't the last, I hope, but it is a sad trend. With better and better AI, you don't even need to have unwieldy control over every party member to have combat mechanics work - having a team of 12 or 20 wouldn't matter as much.

Well, who knows, maybe we'll all have to play MMORPG's to get a party fix in the future. :(

Chrono Trigger did really well in explaining its l...

2009-04-05T16:25:00.000+12:00

Chrono Trigger did really well in explaining its limited party size. For a chunk of the game, the most characters you have available is three. When you find your fourth party member and travel through time, you end up in a surreal void with a single lightpost: the End of Time. It turns out that the timestream can only be bent so much before it breaks, and you'll have to leave party members in the End of Time so that there are only three people jumping around the time-space continuum at once.

On the "why?" front, I think limiting the number of PCs is an important gameplay choice. It reduces the scale of battles and avoids overwhelming the character with too many choices and too many characters to pick from. Pokemon has a party size of six, and that's enough that I often confuse myself with my party selections.