by befowler Wed May 23, 2012 12:02 pm
Yes, you can have 3 pawns -- your "main" pawn that you get to design a few hours into the game, and then two other random ones you can basically hire from other players at certain sort of waypoint things. For higher level ones it looks like you have to pay these sort of discipline/character points to hire them, presumably to discourage you from being able to just hire a 50th level fighter to guard your 3rd level main character. The pawns will show up with their own equipment as outfitted by their human player, and you see all that ahead of time sort of like phantoms in Dark Souls when you look at their summon sign. I hired one guy because his owner had somehow already gotten him outfitted in half plate with a greatsword. At first the server seems to give you a random possible assortment, but you can "favorite" ones you like, and also search by ranking or name I think. Btw the pawns are all computer controlled, so it's not actual other players playing with you unfortunately. The supposed benefit of this for the pawn owner is that when their pawn comes back to them in their world, the owner gets some items and the pawn presumably keeps any new gear they found along the way (the pawns pick up items themselves sometimes). Still not sure how all that works; as I said sometimes I'd get a msg that my pawn had been summoned and returned with X items even though I was also using him in my world.
In terms of party makeup, it's very familiar to any RPG person. There are 3 types of character: warrior, strider (i.e. ranger/archer) and mage. Mages also get some healing skills. I went with a bread and butter 2 warrior, 1 strider, 1 mage buildout and it worked fine. Some foes do seem more susceptible to magic or arrows or melee so it helps to have variety. But I also suspect you can get away with just you and your main pawn if you want (doubt you can play solo with no pawns). I wasn't really tracking how xp was paid out, but everyone was leveling pretty fast so I don't think it was divided by # of pawns.
I thought Skyrim difficulty was a joke, but I'd say so far this is maybe 6/10 on a Dark Souls scale. The pause/healing makes it fairly easy, although they did add a nice feature where you only fully heal at an inn. So you can keep healing during a long fight but your max hp nonetheless keeps dropping so you do need to be a bit careful. I've killed 3 bosses and not died yet, but have had some close shaves particularly with knockdowns and pack enemies. Mage spells also seem very slow to cast so you need to guard your mages while they wind up, and you can't expect them to heal you instantly. You can issue very basic commands to your pawns using the directional buttons, but mostly they run around on their own. AI seems good and they also often give you handy tips or point out things you may have missed (one actually told me he saw a chest down a cliff that I missed).
Since I'm writing an essay anyway, I should note that another preparation element is that there is a sort of crafting/alchemy system you can use at inns too. I've only scratched the surface of this, but you can combine or refine all sorts of items and ingredients to make equipment/improved healing items etc. I suspect that will become important once I get farther along, particularly since encumbrance is a factor and healing item weight is not negligible so I'll want to only carry high quality stuff. But some of the healing items look like Demon Soul's grasses which is pretty sweet.