JS: The companion system is mostly focused on role-playing, it’s not really mechanically focused so much. There are occasionally minor mechanical effects from it. We looked at how companions were handled in Pillars 1 and one of the things we found is that people wanted companions to chime in to stuff in the world more often. Second, we found that people wanted NPC’s in the world to react to the companions reacting to them. So, it felt like when a companion made an aside, it was said to the player silently or to the camera almost, because the NPC’s would never pick up on it and say anything back. So, we wanted to make them feel like they’re more engaged, and we also wanted the player to feel like the player could develop relationships over time. Right away, we knew we were going to devote more time to writing the companions overall.
There’s something systemic I’ve been thinking about doing since the early 2000’s, something more or less called a topic-based system for adjusting companion reactivity. It’s a little complicated, but I’ll break it down: in a lot of games, companions will be set up to hate or love each other and you’re along for the ride as they hit these certain break points. There may or may not be a lot of evidence leading up to that point, but those companions are designed to like or dislike each other. I wanted to try and find something that married the more organic and systemic elements of a game with narrative offerings that sort of fit the ideas we have as designers.
For example, Edér, beloved Edér, is your racist uncle. A lot of people didn’t realize that until later on in Pillars of Eternity that Edér has some latent racist ideas about Orlans; he doesn’t think of himself as a racist, but he has these backwards ideas that come up in comments here and there, but once an Orlan joins the party, he starts saying this racist stuff and doesn’t really realize it, but players are like “wow, this dude is racist.” The idea is that there are certain topics that different companions will respond positively or negatively to. They can come from other companions or the player. When those topics are hit, like someone being anti-god in the case of Pallegina,someone being racist in the case of Edér, someone being cruel to animals, which is a thing that Edér doesn’t like but other people might do, these are things that companions will react to.
They can react to either systemically where they’ll express dissatisfaction through either a physical tick like scratching their beard and shaking their head or plucking their tongue or they will actually chime in and say, “that’s not cool, I don’t like that.” But when that happens, that’s what is moving that relationship in a certain direction. It’s not something that is random or unplanned; it’s something where we’re like “hey, if this character doesn’t like racists, and we know Edér is racist, we should plan for and author a relationship between them that hinges on the expression of that behavior”. But, if you don’t actually have those topics come up a lot, then that relationship will not develop in that way. It could develop in a positive way or not develop at all. Of course, in the case of someone like Pallegina, if you keep asking her what she thinks about the gods, she’s going to keep saying about how she hates them and anyone who thinks of that as offensive is going to continue taking offense.
So, much like being at Thanksgiving with your racist uncle, there are certain topics you might try to avoid in conversation because you know that it’s going to set someone else off. That’s what I feel like is a very interesting aspect of the system. These aren’t random things, you will start to see and experience and you’ll go like “oh s---, if this person keeps going, this other person is going to keep getting angrier, so I have to try and drive the conversation away from these topics. Or, maybe I don’t give a s--- and I’ll exacerbate that and move towards those topic points.” In a way that you might expect, when those relationships come to a head, even positive ones, you’re there as a central character as the captain of the Defiant and the people that bring these others together, you’re there to smooth things over or move things along in the case of a romance or friendship. It’s been a delicate balance because it is not random, where anyone can have any sort of relationship with anyone, but something where if someone says “I can’t stand Pallegina because she’s so hateful of religion and the gods”, the player just shouldn’t be like “what, I haven’t heard her say anything like that” but should be like “yeah dude, she’s said it like half a dozen times”. So, it really feels like a natural outgrowth of the behavior you’ve already seen.
The problem with the afflictions in PoE wasn't that they were too complex, it's that they had minor effects that you could easily shrug off. In D&D the 'frightened' effect made you run away in panic, in PoE it's just a minor penalty to accuracy. From the way he describes Deadfire's 'solution', it sounds like they added even more pointles bloat rather than making afflictions have meaningful and distinctive effects.
