Maybe a quirk should be that if you want to change your favorite, you need to either dismiss the current one or wait until it dies.
So people will not change favorites just to make them immortal.
True, there should definitely be something like that to prevent switching them on the fly.
Maybe you’d have to do it at a very specific location, ritual spot, or a workbench, and as you say - only when you dismiss a current one and only once in a while.
It’s a nice idea, but it’s a band-aid for the fact that the designers at Funkhram are making design decisions that are disastrous within the limitations of the game as it is.
All my followers are my favorites, I don’t want any of them to die as a result of other people’s terrible decisions. If they die it should be a result of my own poor decisions.
As it stands my followers only die because:
Funkhram messed with weapon combos and hyper-armor in a way that makes combat feel extremely lopsided, result is players and followers die a lot more
Funkhram can’t fix their AI, so when a follower is against a wall, or even near an object, they just stop fighting
Funkhram can’t create any sense of balanced combat, purges sends hordes of spear-pokers to surround and kill followers… followers who theoretically could fight back and prevail, but instead just stand and die
Funkhram can’t fix their AI, so followers will regularly ignore their disengage distance, ignore commands to disengage, and happily run into the dumbest most dangerous situation, then stand against a wall and die
AoW did a terrible job re-imagining combat. It was so bad that after struggling at it, and failing miserably, they threw their hands up in the air and said “just change the default server setting for follower damage to 0.5 and push it live!”
They left damage multipliers in a Willy Wonka state for all of ch1 and ch2. That was a change so ill-conceived it should never have been pushed live, and once live it did not require more than a week of observation to realize, “no, we really screwed this up, it should be reverted immediately.” Instead they waited until chapter 3.
Now with chapter 3 Dennis said “oh I play with a controller so I’m gonna go ahead and ruin combat for mouse/keyboard users”.
Bottom line I don’t think the base game is ready for new features. They keep adding new features on top of a foundation that is a total mess, and they keep changing the foundation as well. All their poor decisions and buggy code interact in ways that result in a terrible gameplay experience. Just chill out on introducing new bugs for a while and get the foundation right.
All true, but I don’t hope for those things to improve significantly.
There’s this update loop some developers follow, where each update they want to change the meta so that “content” online gets more views and content creators get something “significant” to hype about (positively or negatively, they benefit equally - nerf it one patch, revert 2 patches later, each time you get a spike in views, reignite interest).
As you said, when the foundation is set, you can do these things all day long, tweak the meta every 3 months, sell new stuff, etc. - many MMO games do it with success for a decade or more. But the problem is they tweak the foundations themselves every 3 months because the AI and animations were wonky to begin with, and each new change feels like adding more duct tape, and there’s so much duct tape where their only solutions are to either rebuild the combat from the ground up, or add more duct tape.
Everything but the building system (which is extremely fun and addictive) is half-arsed.
This characteristic half-arsing is most clearly obvious in encounters with NPCs, where they have less life and personality than a vending machine. Conan Exiles NPCs make Oblivion look like The Witcher 3.
Which is weird, with so much source material and possible dialogue, characters, quest lines they could get inspired by (without necessarily using the same names and locations if those are the issues).
But hey…back to respawnable thrall(s)…if they ever introduce thrall respawning, I really wouldn’t like if all thralls became respawnable - it’d shorten the gameplay loop and ruin the “endgame”. There would be no stakes left in the endgame. That’s why only one respawnable thrall should be enough.
You think it would be okay in PvP, since thralls die fast anyway? You’d still have to run back to your bed (or the wheel) to respawn the thrall, which you wouldn’t wanna do mid-combat in the first place.
Or maybe have a delay of 1 day, for example, before you can revive it.
And in the case that they make thralls respawnable at the spot where they died, would their corpses be lootable by enemies?