Slave to your companion

Even if you think companions are a good feature, as I do, you should be fighting tirelessly to let BW and the industry know that it's not a good feature for the genre.

Really unfortunate you can't choose to have a companion, game is difficult enough you have to have one, because I really hate having to deal with one.

And its not bad enough you have to use one or die, but you are completely reliant on them to keep you alive, so basically this game forces you to rely on AI to play. Just sucks this is the route Bioware chose leaving the player with no real choice in the matter..putting your play in the hands of AI.

Really unfortunate you can't choose to have a companion, game is difficult enough you have to have one, because I really hate having to deal with one.

And its not bad enough you have to use one or die, but you are completely reliant on them to keep you alive, so basically this game forces you to rely on AI to play. Just sucks this is the route Bioware chose leaving the player with no real choice in the matter..putting your play in the hands of AI.

For starters, don't lump responses together; you act like I started this thread, or that I've even made a complaint on the order of "whaaawhaa I'm a slave to my AI driven companion whaa."

All I've said is that it's a great single-player mechanic, but so out of place in an MMO that it shouldn't have even made it off the concept board (much like BW's implementation of space combat, but for different reasons).

If this is a feature that subsequent MMOs copy and use as blindly as BW copied and used ezmode quest trackers or heavy instancing, then it's a terrible omen for future MMO development.

You know where companions would be right at home? Post-BC WoW. I hear hand holding is all the rage in Azeroth.

I get your point that they can't be removed from this game. They're as ingrained as the incredibly linear, and therefore incredibly boring, story line. But developers have proven time and again that they'll mindlessly copy features from other games if those features are received successfully in other games.

Companions in this game, as great as they are in a single-player RPG such as KotoR, as ingrained as they are into this game, are tied directly into the linear, hand-held storybook feel of this game, the same impression that you'll see repeated time and again over the next few months as this MMO experiences the same population swings every other major MMO since WoW has experienced.

While you may not measure this game's success on the basis of how many millions of active subscribers it can maintain, BW probably factors that more heavily, and EA measures success entirely by that single metric. So even if you're content to watch me leave for D3, you'll be upset when BW pushes patch 1.X off because EA started cutting back on their budget. I watched it happen with WAR, and there's no reason at all to think it won't happen here.

Even if you think companions are a good feature, as I do, you should be fighting tirelessly to let BW and the industry know that it's not a good feature for the genre.

I hear WoW is losing sunscribers so I'm sure they have lots of server space available for you. Laters!

reading thru the posts in this thread, i love how companions have turned into this feature that bioware invented and therefore bw is accountable for whether u nerds approve or disapprove of them.

i mean, really? what the OP said about "having your life in the hands of a companion" can be applied to every final fantasy game, chrono trigger, dragon age... the list goes on and on. it's like crying about basic features like... having a mount. "oh the game is so massive that i have to have a mount, f*ck you bioware!". just really, really dumb logic behind these complaints.

and those of you who agree with the OP, i need to know: what do you do when youre playing that you sit there and in your head, you think "man i really hate this companion who heals me and helps me kill NPCs and crafts things for me". just defies the entire fleet of rational thought.