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.

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