Companion influence transfer

[Ceinwyn]

In briefest possible terms, my suggestion is companion influence transfer as the title states.

 

How? I'm not a programmer or game developer but I'm sure it's possible. Maybe an influence transfer item reward for personal conquest or something purchasable with comms? There are a lot of options, I'm sure.

 

I suggest this because I have a feeling one of the next issues for Bioware to deal with (if the companion balance issue ever dies down) is going to be if a player's favourite high influence companion dies as part of the story.

 

Companion X with influence level 50 dies never to return? No problem! Transfer their influence to the very much alive Companion Y. Further, one could also use it if they were simply tired of their main companion and wanted to run around with someone else for a while.

 

Now I'm not against choices that matter and I feel so far the story is quite intuitive. If you want Companion X to like you, don't do stuff they're going to disagree with. Significant twists and turns may come out of left field, sure, but most of the time the player has at least some control over what's going to happen.

 

With an upper limit of 250,000, I don't think anyone could argue that maxing out a companion's influence doesn't take a significant amount of time, effort and/or credits. Since influence - not in all cases, but in a lot of cases - is "bought" with gifts, I see no reason why it shouldn't be transferable.

 

Just a thought anyway. Players might be devastated if ilevel 50 companion dies but something like this might ease the pain a little.

[Muljo_Stpho]

I've noticed a button on unavailable companions (those missing after starting KotFE story) that let's you reclaim the gear that they were wearing. I'd picture this idea as functioning similar to that. Click a button -> Receive package and lose an influence rank. The package could contain a random companion gift of a specific grade and quality depending on the influence rank that was lost. (It wouldn't be a complete transfer of all influence from one companion to another but it would be very easy to implement and it would be enough to help rank up some other companions.) The option would be there until they're cut down to rank 1.

 

On the other hand, this thought may be too logical for them. I mean, when they snuck in the random material satchels into the game they only created a single superpack (in green / blue / purple quality) that could contain absolutely anything at any point in the game instead of being smart about it and creating separate random packs for each grade of materials so that security chests on each planet could contain random materials of an appropriate level for the planet. So with that example as a precedent, if they implemented my idea they'd probably only make a single random gift satchel and it would contain random gifts from the FULL list of companion gifts. It would be that same satchel claimed regardless of whether you're redacting the lost companion down from 47 to 46 or down from 3 to 2.

 

EDIT: Still though... smart about it or not, if they introduced this and it it wasn't just for lost / dead companions, that would kind of sort of introduce a mechanism for people to tune their companions up/down like a difficulty slider without actually introducing a fully functional difficulty slider feature (an idea that's been thrown around in other topics - it could essentially scale your total presence up/down by some amount up to 50% (or however far they want to allow it to be boosted/penalized) and enforce a penalty/bonus to credits and xp gained from kills to match the presence bonus/penalty that you're taking (risk vs reward, less risk = less reward), this slider would likely have to be overridden and set to neutral when you're PVP flagged or when you're in a group / doing group content). Want to make your companion weaker to add a bit of challenge for yourself? Remove a few of their ranks. Want to make them stronger because you enjoy easy mode? Get some gifts wherever you can and rank them up.

Edited November 19, 2015 by Muljo_Stpho