Party Member Implementation Poll

I didn't really mean to stay silent for this long, but some stuff that I wanted to post didn't quite pan out in a timely fashion, so I figured I might as well make a poll for you all to weigh in on in the meantime. This is something that I've been thinking about for a while, and I'm not 100% sure about how to move forward with it.

It's a bit of a long winded explanation, but this decision will have a big effect on how the game's narrative plays out in the future, so I hope you all take the time to read it.

Essentially, the dilemma has to do with when new party members join and how they would be integrated with the dialogue and story of Fataclysm. There isn't really an easy way to do it any way you slice it, so I figured I might as well make a poll to help decide what should happen.

To lay the foundation for the question at hand, I also want to make a clarification:

I've stated in the past that new party members will replace specific slots in the group. So, for example, I said that Leona would have to swap for Estelle when she gets added. I've changed my mind on this, and with the adjustments to the code in v0.1.3, it's more than possible for party members to easily swap with anyone. So, in the future, building your party will actually be something that you can do, instead of there only being binary choices for each role.

However, this decision poses a massive problem - dialogue. If any combination of four party members is possible, then making dialogue actually work will be a complete nightmare, without even mentioning the fact that every added party member in the future would make things exponentially more difficult.

So, to remedy the dialogue conundrum, my solution would be for every party member to travel with the group at all times. Obviously this introduces some new problems (don't tell Kass), but I believe that the slightly contrived things that would need to happen in the plot to justify it would be much more preferable to the mess of dialogue that I would have to sort through with the other option.

Mechanically, you would still have 4 party members, but every character that's joined the group would participate in dialogue no matter who's in your party. Kinda like a JRPG where you pick only four party members to do all the fighting, and then everyone pretends that they contributed in the cutscene afterwards.

Obviously from a narrative standpoint it's pretty stupid that only an arbitrary number of people get to do things in combat (and the whole JRPG example is pretty silly), but I have some cool ideas for how benched party members can still contribute, how their progression would work mid-run, the ability to swap them out, and so on. I can't say anything for certain about that right now, but I think it'll make gameplay more interesting overall.

Also, as a quick note, this is all happening under the assumption that there will be 7 total party members once the game is "done" and 1.0 is released, including the current 4. So, that would be Leona plus two other unspecified characters joining the group before the game is actually beatable.

Anyways... with that extremely long clarification out of the way, it's time for the actual point of the post. How/when should future party members actually join? The two different ideas that I've come up with are as follows:

Scripted/Unmissable Join Times: With this option, party members would join at the same time for everyone. So, for example, when you first enter the Palace, Leona would join for every player no matter what they do. I'll come right out and say that I prefer this option, for a few reasons:

-New party members can always be directly involved in the narrative or story of a specific layer, instead of having their story locked behind recruiting them first. This would also let me much more easily tell the actual story of the game without having to worry about future party members as much!

-Dialogue can be much more involved because it's far easier to know who's in the party at any given time, instead of having to shove in random characters for each and every little scenario that might exist

-The only extra work that I would have to do for old dialogue would be on previous layers that don't include the particular party member, which is much easier than potentially having to rework literally every piece of dialogue in the game. The linearity and guarantee of when party members join would also make this task much easier. Obviously it would still be alot of work, but less of an exponentially difficult pain in the ass.

However, this option wouldn't come without downsides. There would definitely be pacing problems with the rate at which party members join (though I would obviously work on them so they're less of an issue), and the story would overall be more linear. I would also have to rewrite a good amount of the dialogue in the Palace to account for this change, but I'm fine with that.

Personally I don't mind linearity in games, but this poll exists so I can find out if you all feel the same way. As outlined above, I personally feel that the big upsides of scripted join times would far outweigh any new issues with pacing or linearity.

Unscripted/Missable Join Times: With this option, party members would join whenever certain requirements are fulfilled, and thus the time of recruitment would vary from player to player. For example, Leona would join the party only after her friendly encounters have been pursued and (potentially) a quest is done for her.

This approach would allow you all to recruit party members at different times, essentially making the progression of when they join entirely nonlinear. While this would be a cool concept, I think that the difficulties missable party members would add to all dialogue across the entire game, as well as to the overall narrative, would be very detrimental.

However, if you all value the idea of party members joining only after you've properly "earned" their loyalty through some progression or quest over multiple runs, then I'm open to hearing out the idea.

Now obviously this poll setup isn't very fair for both sides, but I just wanted to make it clear that I've thought alot about what either option has to offer (despite the fact that I definitely came up short on the second one). To be entirely honest, this is intended as less of a poll and more of me making sure that you all are on board with the idea of party members joining based on story progression. Obviously I'm biased here, but I want to make sure that everyone agrees on what the best path forward is instead of just making a decision on my own.

Hope my yapping didn't bore you all to death, but I figured this was important enough to make a long post about. Also, if anyone has any ideas about a different way that I could go about all of this, feel free to leave them in the comments.

(thanks bun)