Georg Zoeller, Star Wars: The Old Republic’s most-prolific developer forum poster has been speaking about companion characters and the removal of the permanent death system. In the past, players were able to kill off their companions for good. That extreme choice has now been removed from the game. BioWare has stated that, based on negative player feedback, the ability to kill off your companions will not make it into the final game.
'He's dead, Jim.' (Oops, wrong IP. Sorry 'bout that.)
On July 22nd, Zoeller explained BioWare’s take on the issue:
“A number of things happened:
Companions, since that feature was created, have become even more integral to the game: They run your crafting missions. They are vital to your PVE combat performance. They allow you to substitute for missing roles in flashpoints. They are at your side are in Open World PvP.
All these functions are on top of their function within the story and losing a companion puts you at a permanent competitive disadvantage in the game. Yes, you made a choice, and yes, we might even warn you about it … still: Bad choices happen when the long term consequences are not clear and the impact of this choice is like cutting off one of your limbs in our game. Ultimately, the choice you want to make for story reasons should not come at a permanent gameplay disadvantage.
Finally, our experience in testing for several months revealed significant complaints about the feature.
While it is great in concept, it did not sit well with a lot of players. We extrapolated the complaints and number of customer support incidents dealing with this issue based on the amount of testing support requests (It’s amazing how many variations of “Guys, I accidentally killed my healer companion. Totally by accident. Now I am gimped. Can I haz back?” there are) to the launch population and that made clear that this feature was not a winner.
So, in short: We’ve tested it. It wasn’t great. We cut it. We’re sorry if some of you liked the design, it just turned out that with all the other changes we made to companions over time, this one had to go. You can see that as us selling out, but the way we see is ‘phew, a bullet successfully dodged through the testing program. Thanks testers.’”
Do you heartless bastards REALLY want to kill off Blizz the Jawa? Think of the plushies!
Zoeller also clarified further with these words:
“Let’s give a hypothetical (to avoid spoilers) example for how this can work.
A companion might have betrayed you. In the past, one of the options for our character to react to it was to kill him. For many players, that would make total sense, but it would fight with the fact that they rely on that character for certain crafting missions, or even for combat prowess.
If we are successful with story and presentation, you will experience emotions like anger or disbelief in those situations and they will lead to passionate short term reactions, like selecting that ‘I don’t forgive traitors [kill him]‘ option.
Popping a warning window up at that point isn’t great, it really interrupts the story. Just letting the player kill the companion isn’t great, because most players do not read Forums and they do expect games to be fair to them. The game in this case wouldn’t be fair. In order to make the emotional choice you wanted, you’d have to forget about the permanent disadvantage your character would have to endure.
Instead, now, you might get a different option, maybe ‘I cannot risk letting a traitor go free [carbonize]‘, maybe ‘You can think about what you’ve done while you rot in the brig [imprison]‘. Those options would obviously have an extreme hit on affection.
I do think it’s possible to retain the integrity of the story that is important to BioWare story fans this way without having the large scale customer support issues when the feature meets traditional MMO players not used to such things.
We totally realize some of you still would have liked the old system, but there is a 0% chance of that coming back.”
On July 29th, in the massive forum thread that exploded around the topic, Zoeller defended the dev team’s position and explained that, while he is a fan of “sandbox elements” (such as permanent death,) that isn’t the type of game BioWare is making. SWTOR is a story-directed game and decisions need to be made to support to overall vision. Actually, don’t let me put words in the man’s mouth. Here’s Zoeller again:
“That’s fine if I draw your ire, I can live with that.
Naturally, as one of the more active members of the development team, the statistical chance that I am the one giving you bad news about something you care about is fairly high to start with.
The funny thing is, I actually like sandbox games.
But, I also have an obligation to communicate the truth about the game we are making and that means ensuring that there isn’t any ambiguity out there in regards to what kind of game The Old Republic is.
So please understand that if I tell people that this game is a new game and neither inspired nor meant as a sequel to another Star Wars MMO, I am managing their expectations. We want people to understand what this game is about when they buy it.
And yes, sometimes I am fairly blunt about this particular topic. That’s not because I dislike that other MMO, or because I hate sandbox elements (I don’t). It’s because expectations in this particular area tend to run unchecked.
Short: You’re actually just shooting the messenger. Granted, that messenger can be blunt and loud and his statements can make you angry, but still, he’s just the messenger of news you don’t want to hear.
We are on the finishing stretches for this game, the first BioWare MMO set in the Star Wars: The Old Republic era. It’s a spiritual sequel to the KotOR games and focuses heavily on bringing BioWare story into the MMO space. It features a highly polished and fluent evolution of traditional MMO combat systems. It has the bells and whistles of a modern MMO, it’s faithful to the IP and universe it’s set in and it features BioWare’s signature features such as story, companions, etc.
Does this mean we don’t have any sandbox elements? No, there are quite a few features you’d classify as sandbox in the traditional MMO sense.
Does this mean the development team hates sandboxes ? No. It’s just not the primary focus of the game we are making.
Does this mean we are never going to have ([your favorite feature from another game])? No. What happens after launch will be heavily driven by player demand. If there is an measurable demand for a feature and we think it can be integrated well into our game, it’ll go on the ‘Wall of Crazy’ for discussion and potential future inclusion in the game.
TL;DR: If I tell you ‘no, we won’t be doing your favorite feature for launch’, it’s not because I hate you. It’s because it’s the truth.
This is part of our philosophy of waiting until we’re sure about a feature’s implementation before we talk about it.
I would like to think, in the long run, you’d prefer to hear the truth instead of having me tell you we are totally thinking about adding a feature you like, when in fact we might not be.”
So, what think you TOR fans? Can you live without killing your companion characters? I certainly can. Especially if I might regret killing one down the road – in a game I’m likely to play for years. Let us know.
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I am happy with the change that they made in regards to killing companions. For me, personally, I would be one of those players that had a totally raw emotional moment and killed my companion because of it. I certainly would give no thought to long term problems, and I would probably regret my decision sometime later.
One other comment: I completely understand and appreciate the purpose for forums, but that being said, IDK how the devs do it. I go to the forums and get completely disgusted with the genral negativity towards other users, devs, or anything really. I hope the good balances out the bad, or maybe I just miss the good bcuz I don’t like reading such negativity and I usually leave quickly. Thank you, TORwars, for digging out the stuff that matters to me.
I can live with it not being there, as I could live with it being there. It was a cool feature, but not one that would make or break the game for me.
While I did think that killing companions was a nice story element, I often wondered how it would impact gameplay. Now that I see how integral companions are to many aspects of the game, including crafting, PvE and PvP (this last one is going to be intersting to see), I’m glad they’ve made the proper design choice. Sometimes gameplay does have to take presidence over other aspects and I applaud Bioware for this. Not only does it save the players grief if they accidently killed a vital part of their character’s day-to-day MMO life, but it will save countless hours of Bioware’s time and effort in GM ticket by players pleading to have them restored.
I understand the appeal of choice. I understand the selling point that choice presented when we could kill off companions – that of ultimate consequence. However, I’m glad Bioware is making its own smart choices to avoid unintentional player grief down the line.
It also sounds like, from what has been mentioned, that the times when the story would have given you that choice, it may now give you slightly less permanent ways of hinting to your companion that you are less than pleased with them: freezing in carbonite and stays in the brig were mentioned.
I don’t see this change as somehow gutting the your stories, just accommodating the realities of MMO game design.
Sounds like a good compromise to me. I really didnt understand how darksiders would craft anything etc when having only one companion – a lone astrodroid, having killed all the others.
While I am fine with the way they are going about this, I would have rather them not ran into this issue in the first place. The problem I see with the system they have is that we all get this particular character that joins us, and these are very specific characters. Sure, you can change appearance, but they are still the same “character”.
While they could still give you a specific character like that, they should let you replace them with a similar generic character can be hired to work with you. Give those generic companions some various personality traits to choose from along with a basic role, and we have characters that we WANT with us.
That way, if you killed your generic character, you could simply hire another. This would allow those who wanted to build relationships with their characters to do so, and those who simply wish to have a hireling also able to do so.
Not sure if that made any sense, but that is how I feel the system should have been in the first place. They could have avoided this issue entirely like this.
I completely agree that this “issue” could have could have been avoided and patched up easily if it had been integrated and supported by game design from jump.
A hire stand-in mercenary who fights and crafts with limited opinion, or influence on story would have been very interesting. As well as a couple of alternate companions that could be unlocked should you choose to kill one of your team. This would offer incentives and depth to character choices without permanently “gimping” players for a feature that the company claimed to be one major selling point to the philosophy of this game: Choice Matters.
As far as being the spiritual successor to the KOTOR games, I believe gray-side heroes are an integral part of their legacy. It would have been very interesting if each class shared a potential gray-side ally with one mirror class across the faction. Unlocking him/her would only be possible by killing a companion, that stuck firm to your traditional faction dark-side light-side alignment. There were plenty of ways they could have supported this feature if they were serious about designing it from jump. At this point, it is pretty hard to backtrack to fix mistakes.
They could also have simply made a revive concoction that was extremely hard to craft, and built themselves an “out” that way from massive player complaints.
As an active and proud member of the forum community for SWTOR sometimes I want to reach through the interwebs and slap some of these angry and vocal whiners out there.
I hate the fact that Georg, who in all his decisions and interactions with the community has been quite awesome IMO, has to take time out to deal with these types of people. It was a simple game design decision that the devs, who are far better equipped and knowledgeable about the game than we, have decided to remove. I won’t miss it in the slightest and neither will the vast majority of the players. The ones who are screaming out about this perceived injustice won’t miss it either, but this is simply a way for them to anonymously criticize the game and show off their internet muscles.
BioWare made the smart decision to remove this TRIVIAL (yes it’s trivial) feature from the game in order to prevent years and years of issues relating to people either accidentally killing or (much more likely) changing their minds about it. I foresaw this being an issue with all the whiners who have no one to blame but themselves. These people who kill off one of their companions and then 6 months later when a new patch adds some new feature to said companion, they’re calling BW customer service and DEMANDING (with all their unjust entitlement) that BW fix their issue and bring back the companion and if BW doesn’t then they’ll complain and flame them for putting in a stupid system in the first place knowing that it would cause issues, blah blah…
Georg, please ignore this simple-minded “forum heroes” out there and just keep doing a great job. You’ll always have people who get off on being contradictory regardless of how that actually feel.
Zoeller just keeps on Zoellering.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj9HHP0Of24
“Guys, I accidentally killed my healer companion. Totally by accident. Now I am gimped. Can I haz back?”
Catering to -that- is what pisses me the hell off. No I’m not mad at the freakin’ messenger. No, I’m not entirely mad at a company doing whatever it can to ensure that it will do enough to bring in enough people to make as much profit as possible.
I’m -angry- with the fact that that is apparently the norm. God forbid, -the damn option itself says -KILL-!- Bigass word, probably much larger lettering! How the hell do you miss something like that? How do you “accidentally” shoot a traitorous bastard in the head with the purpose of killing them?!
Dark side my backside.. you get betrayed, there’s none of this “Bad boy, go to your room!” crap, you end them so they don’t get the chance to do it again, and make an example for the rest of the crew to realize you’re not one to be screwed with. Hell, add revenge sidequests where you track down those closest to the person who betrayed you and you killed; with the option of either trying to break the bad news and take the heat from them in some awkward attempt at redemption, or send them packing on a one-way ticket to meet that sorry sob.
I hope to hell there’s some sort of dark side option available (that actually -is- dark side) to force choke/lightning/shoot-in-leg/shatter jaw/etc. said companion because forgiveness is a sign of weakness in that culture, failing the possibility of their usefulness outweighing the threat of betrayal. Running a crew full of hardened dark side-types and bending like.. ugh.
I like to soapbox about game design decisions as much as the next gamer, but the fact of the matter is, none of us are game developers, paid to know our shit about making games that are fun. (If someone happens to be so, you’re the exception that makes the rule.)
It’s so easy to sit at home and complain about a game design choice, but rarely do people actually sit down and think it through all the way. They want some feature, in this case, being able to kill off your companion characters, and latch onto it as if it’s the sole reason to play the game.
In reality, 95% of the people who play the game won’t choose to kill their CC. Of the remaining percent, 1 out of 10 will go “woops, didn’t think it would go that far that fast” and complain to customer support. Out of a million players, that’s still a HUGE number of support tickets. Thousands, in fact. And there will be far in excess of a million people playing this game.
So the feature was tested, the testers decided it was more damaging to the game than it was beneficial and they took it out. Sounds like good game development strategy to me.
Do I personally think it should have been left in place? I don’t know, not having played the game. But, having played many other games, including all of Bioware’s games, I think it’s safe to say the feature should never have been an option in the first place. It’s a fun concept, but in terms of gameplay, it’s not a good idea. It’s like killing Wrex in ME. I went down that path once just to see what would happen and immediately loaded the game. Why would I limit my gameplay in the future?
Other decisions, like (Spoiler at the end of ME) are huge, impactful, emotional, etc., etc., but happen to someone other than you and yours. You don’t need to lightsaber a CC to feel like things are exciting and dramatic. As a darkside character, you’ll be doing it all day, so knifing one of your own won’t be as climactic as you think it would be.
Maybe they should try a midle of the road tactic and if a player kills, make it injures, a companion they are taken out of play for a period of time, say weeks or months until they heal.
Whilst i understand gz’s position, this isnt a either or scenario. Its about choice.
Accidental companion death could easily have been avoided by placing the option to kill characters in the preference menu. With an appropriate warning when ticking the button. If you tick the button then select the option in game to kill a companion, dont moan about it afterwards. After all we dont get a chance to change an advanced class selection which has an equivilent impact.
Or if this is too difficult or unpalatable then there are plenty of other options.
If the plotline forces you to keep a companion after they have betrayed you, at least be creative with the response options. Rather than 3ascot variants of ‘I Forgive You’ text’, provide the option to say ‘you. Will suffer for this’ place a shock collar on the offending companion with the option of ‘Shut up slave! (SHOCK)’ in all future conversations.
Loosing character abandonment and not providing a full range of appropriate options is just lazy development and lazy storytelling.