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In SWTOR, there is appreciable health and ability power benefits to levelling up "influence" with your companion.
This is done in one of two ways:
You get a certain amount of influence by doing things in conversation they like or dislike (yep, doing stuff they dislike gets you influence too, used to lose you influence but bioware fans didnt like that)
or
You give them gifts that raise their influence
Both of these are considerable time sinks. Giving a gift is a 3 second channeled action and you need anywheres between 20-100 to raise influence a level. And neither of them have to be or should be. In previous games such as Dragon Age, there was no time investment in this case.
Make no mistake, SWTOR is a game that deliberately tries to pad out play time for subscription revenues. To level up your party to maximum influence with gifts takes literally five days of sitting at a screen clicking the same button every 3 seconds and hearing the same line from that NPC.-
It isnt any shorter getting it by doing story content either.
And the difference of companion HP between say, influence level 10 (about where you'll get just doing the campaign line) and max level is literally six degrees of magnitude.
This is why a lot of people who haven't min/maxed are having a lot of difficulty with Eternal Championship, it is balanced towards PCs, and a "level 65" companion at influence level 10 is incredibly weaker than a level 65 companion at influence level 25. Let alone max. -
@maiyannah Subscriptions are bad.
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@nerthos Honestly I don't mind them with a MMO provided they're not egregiously expensive given there is the cost of keeping a server up to consider, but a game intentionally dragging stuff out like that is a bullapple and exploitative design.
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@maiyannah Eh, I personally would never sign up for anything that has a subscription fee, but different tastes I guess.
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@nerthos With "always online" becoming more of a thing, expect to see it more.
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@maiyannah Hopefully the pirate servers keep up. Still though, as far as I've seen the age of subscriptions is fading. I remember how badly TESO did with that.
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@nerthos TESO had trouble with that because the game itself was pretty batcave, though to Bethesda's credit they did a lot to clean it up and it's not bad at all now. But the content on release day was pretty thin on the ground and what was there, was pretty apple.
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@maiyannah Well I can't comment on that as I only played it after it went on one-time-puchrase mode. I do like how they set it up now though. Buy it once, then you can buy whatever expansion you want, or you can subscribe to access all.
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@nerthos The free-to-play launch basically happened because of how bad the original launch crashed, so silver linings and all that.
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@maiyannah Well, I'm personally happy with it. I would have never bought it otherwise.
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