User blog:Spinfx/Overhauling Pawns

Like most of you, I've butted heads with the Pawn Inclination system and found it wanting. The problem with Capcom, or rather JRPGs in general, is their love for keeping things "hidden" and "mysterious", so as to allegedly keep players interested and on their toes, rather than expose everything, leaving the guts of the game hanging out for all to see, so to speak.

The problem with this approach is that it's more of an annoyance than anything. Imagine if your HP didn't show up in numbers, but merely showed your character's face like in the old Doom games - at full/good health you'll be smiling, when you're "a bit hurt" you'll be frowning, when you're badly injured you'll have bruises all over your face, and at critical health the face will look appropriately bloodied. The thing is, this may be amusing for all of half an hour or so after release, after which it will get quickly annoying. How can you measure your progress (level up, increase in maxHP via skills or items, etc) if you can't see your HP and have to rely on something as vague as your character's facial expression?! It's not just annoying, it's stupid.

Hence my beef with the Pawn Inclination system. Great, we have "Primary" and "Secondary" slots, and presumably a lower Tertiary tier lurking, hidden, until you make a choice when using a Knowledge Chair. Not only that, the inclinations themselves are arbitrarily designed: some are combat-oriented (e.g. Mitigator) while others don't have anything to do with combat at all (e.g. Acquisitor). What happens if neither of both slots are combat related, e.g. a Pioneer/Acquisitor combo? Will that pawn just stand around and hold it's dick when combat happens? It doesn't, it actually does fight. Ok, but then how the hell is it determining how to fight? That's right, this is more of that hidden shit in action again.

Fail.

As a long-time RPG gamer and game modder, here's my take on a system that won't have players flaming each other on forums on how it works, when they're not yelling at the screen when the AI does something boneheaded.

Have the slots fixed to cover behavior for specific situations. For example, combat may require a slot for target selection which we currently have in the form of the vanilla inclinations Scathor, Challenger, and Mitigator.

Another slot should be devoted to teamwork. Should the AI be aggressive, by charging in first and holding agro? This would be good for tanks. Should it be supportive, by buffing and healing when necessary? Btw, it seems stupid to me that this is actually SEPARATE in this game, i.e. Utilitarian and Medicant. Why? If the AI has a heal spell equipped, it should use it. Of course, the question is WHEN it should use it. But that goes for buffs too. Common sense dictates buffs should be granted at the start of combat, or when a pawn just learns of a weakness, or when the previous buff expires. Still, this can be prioritized - urgent or not. I'd suggest teamwork have two slots, and if Support is on Primary then it should keep buffs up and heal whenever it can, whereas if it's on Secondary then it should just buff at the start of combat and heal when hp gets low.

Speaking about healing, RPGs which let you adjust AI behavior regarding this actually let you set a threshold. For example in a recent Tales RPG I played, you can tell a particular character to heal you when your hp drops below 75%, 50%, or 25%. That's far better than a vague Primary/Secondary setting. Even better, AIs without heal skills will use items (heck, make this a choice too: use best potions, or use worst potions), so no AI is totally helpless.

Spellcasting. Have you ever watched a caster pawn initiate a spell, cancel, initiate a new spell, cancel, and repeat forever? Happens all the time. This is inexcusable. If the player can adjust his target mid-cast (you know, by moving the analog stick to change the target), then surely an AI pawn should do that rather than outright cancel and then recast the damn thing. At the very least if the original target is still valid, it should not freaking re-evaluate new targets until the spell has been goddamn cast - UNLESS it can do so without cancelling (i.e. just move the spell focus to the new target). In fact I expect my AI to ONLY cancel if it needs to aid another AI or the player and it can't do so with the spell it's currently casting, AND the other AI have already decided to help. E.g. tank pawn gets grabbed by cyclops, so the ranger pawn starts shooting at the cyclops' hands - in this case the mage pawn should not cancel the seism it is busy charging, because someone else (the ranger AI) already went to help.

Picking up items. Oh boy. Why should this even have to be specified? The problem is most of the time pawns ignore drops, even if they walk over the item several times. That's just idiotic. By default they should pick up/harvest whatever is in their immediate vicinity. The Acquisitor inclination should work by making them actively wander around to pick more stuff, rather than just stand around near you, but in either case they should pick things up regardless. You're right on top of it, pick up the damn thing! I can understand if they complain about getting overburdened, but that's fine, in fact that's what they should do (i.e. speak up when a problem occurs, in this case the problem is getting heavy). But we should not need to tell them to pick up stuff. That's the whole point of wandering around the game world, duh. "It took us half an hour to slay this damn drake, let's ignore those scales and follow the player back to town." Gee, maybe at least TELL me in case I didn't notice?

Chattiness. Ugh. Stop telling me that goblins are weak to fire if you'd just said the exact same thing before. Only tell me about the weakness when you learn about it. The End. No, I don't want to be reminded - yes, I know I've got a Thunder-element weapon equipped, that is STILL not a reason to keep reminding me that fire works better. Make quest chatter automatic to fill in the silence, rather than having to explicitly talk to the pawns. I'd rather hear that we need to return to the castle and let Ser Whomever know, instead of oh hey goblins are weak to fire for the 1000th time. In fact, talk to me about quests and lore, give me more tidbits about the world we live in. This does already happen, but those spots are rather few and the lines there are fixed (e.g. walking past a certain point in South Gransys, near the slopes near the Saurian nest, you'll hear a pawn comment about armor and skills).

I got (a lot) more but this is getting pretty long already.