Obsidian: The Life of the Party?

A new blog entry on GameSetWatch covers player-controlled parties in role-playing games, particularly how they are/were handled by BioWare, Black Isle Studios, and Obsidian Entertainment.

If RPG parties don’t seem like a design element fraught with weakness, consider games like Knights or Mass Effect wherein your character faces the greatest conceivable evil in the universe, but isn’t allowed to take more than two people along to fight it.

No game fiction has ever made a convincing argument for why the world’s biggest hero can’t deal with having three guys around at once. Restrictions on party members are a tech limitation, presumably; in the isometric Baldur’s Gate days, the limit was five. Still, there were always more characters available, so why not six? Why not seven? What can they possibly be doing that’s more important than saving the world?

…

Alpha Protocol has one controllable character and no permanent party members. Maybe it’s a deliberate change of pace for Obsidian, or maybe it’s the best solution of all. Alpha Protocol will certainly be free from deadbeats and hangers-on who admonish you for acts of kindness but will still do whatever you say. The best way to deal with those plausibility issues is not to invite them into the design in the first place. It’ll work, but because it’s the safe option.

If it marks the beginning of a new approach for Obsidian, then I’ll miss the subversion and the experimentation. Developers can craft a character with a wealth of personal history, trust issues and the potential for an ice-thawing courtship, and they can have them try to kill me for not buying them shoes. I like the second option more.

Thanks RPG Codex.