Quote:Original post by Kaze In every game like this I have played trying to directly control your charter and order AI characters at the same time has been incredibly cumbersome.
I don't see why it would be cumbersome. If you only have two other characters in the party, it would be as easy as pressing a single key before executing the command that would cause yourself to do the task. So it would only ever be as cumbersome as pressing an extra key.
When the character being controlled dies, you should simply automatically switch to the next available party member until you're out of characters.
As I said in my original post, you should really try out final fantasy 12 since it does a lot of what you're asking about and even has some pretty cool other features (like programming your AI teammates' behaviours, and menu overrides so you can force a teammate to perform a certain action at any time).
Being way behind the gaming curve, I've just recently been playing Half-Life 2. In that game your identity as Freeman is pretty strong, partly because you spend so much time locked to his viewpoint and also partly because the world refers to you constantly as "Gordon" or "Dr. Freeman" or "the Freeman." The warm, friendly conversational style and technology that allows characters to make and keep eye contact (even while walking and talking) really brings this home.
As a practical matter, I doubt I would have felt so connected to Freeman or being Freeman if I missed those moments because I was viewing through the eyes of another character.
You also run the risk of the player preferring to play through another character that's not the main when you have a party. In Project Eden, I loved the fact that the cyborg Amber could walk through fire, arcing electricity and poison gas. So I played most of the game as her, as if she were the main character. But in that game each character had a specialty (one to open special doors, another for hacking, another for repair), and it was often a pain to have to run all the way through a level as one character, keeping the others back because you couldn't trust the AI, then having to go all the way back to get them.
Oh, and slightly off topic, but important:
There are two places in Half-Life 2 so far where I see you get allies, one where the (nonhuman) allies are expendable and continuously respawn, and another where they're a squad.
One thing that would have helped me to identify with them more would have been if they got out of the way. There's nothing more morale draining than to be blocked down a hallway with a grenade at your feet unable to move because your own damn allies won't get out of the way. Even pushing into them and having them move isn't enough-- it's tedious and as frustrating as getting stuck on a wall.
--------------------Just waiting for the mothership...
