I do not want a wheel (although I understand why they implemented it for cross platform). However, it doesn’t work half the time. The wheel functions poorly in the heat of combat; you end up opening up the thrall inventory or simply cannot get close enough due to movement or dealing with your own adversary.
I would like a separate row of key binds for thrall commands similar to what you see in other games.
Follow, Stay, Guard (aggressive stay), Attack, Move to; and then stances. Passive, Assist, Aggressive.
WoW and Ark offer two different alternatives that both work well and make pets seem like an extension of the character and it’s training.
Pets in Conan often create chaos rather than alleviate it because of the poor implementation. You should not have to run half a city mile just to get them to break combat.
Combine with their follow distance being ridiculously short; they end up on top of you blocking your movement when they do finally follow.
I wouldn’t say it was poorly implemented - it’s new to the game (commands were only added a couple of months ago after all) and could still do with some adjustments, but I would imagine they were also trying to find a way not to have it be exactly the same as other games.
That said, I would certainly like to see it expanded for greater flexiblity. And I agree about the follow distance(s) - both how long it stretches when you’re trying to pull them out, and how close they get when you don’t want them to. Ideally I’d like to see them add a ‘tether length’ option, so we can make our own adjustments (though I’ve no idea how hard that would be to do). Although, at least it is a bit better than it was just after the commands were first introduced - I paused for a moment on a ledge while climbing and my tiger immediately appeared next to me and head-butted me off the cliff. (In hindsight it was kinda hilarious and very cat-like - maybe not so funny at the time…)
For what it’s worth, the current command system does allow for separate hotkeys for the existing commands (though not, I believe, for the stances, which seems like it would be the more useful one given that you can single, double or triple-tap for the commands anyway) - it’s in the keybindings somewhere - and it does allow splitting the ‘command’ hotkey apart from the ‘interact’ key, which at least prevents picking up stones when you try to give your follower orders…
Yeah, there are keybinds for those commands, so that’ll help. On the other hand, some commands interact very poorly with some engagement stances or whatever you want to call them.
For example, if your follower is set to attack all enemies, you can’t make it disengage. If you command it to stop, it will stop and then immediately resume attacking the same enemy. If you command it to move to a spot away from the enemy, it will break off, run there, and then run right back to that enemy. If you command it to return to you, it works the same as commanding it to move.
I imagine that’s one of the reasons @Papabear said that it would be nice to be able to bind stances to keys (or controller buttons), too.
On the other hand, that would only help people on PC and leave the console players with the same problems as before. Perhaps it would be better to solve the underlying AI problems.
I read something recently that goes into this a bit, and it seemed to suggest most of us are also using the commands ‘wrong’ - pretty sure it’s the new and expanded Thrall page of the wiki (nope, just checked - there’s info there, but not the bit I’m thinking of - so I don’t know the source, which means the info may be less reliable).
It went into a bit of detail about the commands being more context driven than I had understood them to be (something I think Funcom could maybe have communicated a little more clearly). For instance it suggested that ‘Return’ orders them to go back to the combat if they’ve already been pulled out. If that’s correct, the standard response of running away spamming ‘return’ may actually be prolonging the problem by dragging them out of combat then sending them back to it over and over until the range finally gets far enough.
Like I said, I’ve no idea if this is correct, but it feels plausible. It did feel a bit like maybe by only giving one clear order at a time, I was having more success in controlling their behaviour. But I didn’t really experiment with it much and this was late in a game, with high level thralls, so mostly the only command I was going to need was ‘charge’…
I didn’t know about the “return” command, but I wasn’t spamming that one anyway. I only have “command” (the generic one) bound to a key. One press is either “move” or “attack”, two and three are “stop” and “return”. I usually try to disengage my follower by making it move, sometimes I try “stop” or “return”. None will work well enough if it’s set to attack all enemies.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I have the same problem, lol - possible not helped by also tending to keep followers on attack all (it’s just easier that way… usually…). And as I said, I don’t know for sure that the return command works that way - especially since I can no longer find the source where I got that information so don’t know how reliable it was… TBH mostly I just run away and hope
Well, I certainly don’t know anything about game design. But that does surprise me a little - I would’ve expected any game that outright copies a major system from another (even a secondary one) would face accusations of plagiarism. (But then, I’m starting to see that whatever a game developer does, it seems they’re going to face accusations of something from someone, so I guess maybe that just isn’t that important). I guess the argument is that it’s better for the player base to get something that is known to work, unless the developer has a specific new idea and reason to want to try it?
Does leave me wondering why, that being the case, Funcom didn’t implement something closer to other games. Speculating wildly here - maybe the follower AI is too different for those systems to work?
From the public - yeah, probably. But in a nutshell, game mechanics cannot be protected/copyrighted. I am not a lawyer (thank god!), and it’s not quite that simple in practice, but that’s the gist of it.
Interesting - and yet (in a different field) Wizards of the Coast at one point managed to pretty much trademark the idea of using polyhedral dice in a tabletop rpg (it took a judge that didn’t understand the market…). I think maybe the way the computer games industry is doing it is a better option after all
