Mage Knight: Apocalypse Interview, Part Two
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Q: Do you have any control over your party in the single-player game? We've been told that the developers wanted the party to act independently so that the player can focus on his/her individual experience....
Dave Georgeson: The AI does think for itself, so your sidekicks will go off and do their own thing. There are three easy keys or buttons that you can click on the screen: attack, follow, and stop. Through those you can pretty much get your sidekicks to do whatever you want them to do. You can tell them to stop and they'll hang back. You can tell one sidekick or your whole group to attack a specific target. Or you can tell gm, '˜Please don't attack anything, just follow me.'
With those few things you can totally orchestrate the battle, you can move NPCs in and out of combat, [etc.].
Then you're free to focus on the skills that you have in your own tree as well as your own potions and scrolls. Maybe you want to change out your weapons, all those things. So there's plenty of stuff to do, and the AI takes care of itself.
Chris Wren: We designed the whole system to be passive if you want it to be, the sidekicks will help you out and take care of themselves. They'll die from time to time but are easy to get back. We don't put a big penalty on having sidekicks die on you.
When you first pick a sidekick you get to decide what kind of a sidekick [it will be]. That changed since the beginning. We didn't originally have that in the design. But [now] you can decide what kind of skills he's going to focus on. If you get a dwarf, for example, and you want him to focus on his gun skills. He'll get better gun skills, [increase] his proficiency, and start getting into different gun types.
The way we did it, when you go shopping in the game [by talking to a vendor], it doesn't check at that point. It says, Okay, have you as a player unlocked certain stat skills? And it checks your power rating.
What eventually happens is, when you go shopping, [the sidekicks] will upgrade their armor and weaponry along the skill tree you have picked for them.
Now, talking about the elf. He's got a lot of healing spells, protection spells. You don't necessarily want to have him lead the battle. I usually just leave him back. What's good is that he'll basically [pump up] the party [by casting spells] when he doesn't have anything to attack. Keeping him out of battle is good '˜cause he'll use all his magic on the party to heal it, things like that. Whereas the dwarf and the Amazon, let them go take all the damage.
How you pick your sidekick, and how you want to play your character you build your party however you want. The sidekicks can [be passive], but if you really want to get into it and fill out your party in a specific way, you can.
