Haven't been able to find any info thus far. What'll be the pros and cons of allying or pissing off a faction on the ship?
- Say you piss of the Church of the Elect. Are they going to burst through your shack door yelling, "Repent, sinner!" or "God always has an appointment!" An ambush like in AoD? Dedicated groups hunting you down?
- Or say you befriend the Church. Do they let you waltz through otherwise off limits areas? Do they back you up in a fight or two? Training & tech?
- What if you piss off ALL of them? Constantly fending off attacks?
From one of the updates;
Before we talk about the CSG’s main quest design, let’s talk about the AoD’s main quest to illustrate some points without spoiling anything.
The main quest started vague – "go I know not where, bring back I know not what", and then the faction quests took over as the meat of the game. Essentially, the game wasn’t about finding the temple but instead working for the factions and slowly uncovering what happened in the past. By the time you’ve visited all 3 cities and learned what you can about the factions, the war, and the gods, you know where the temple is and you're ready to make your choice. That fairly important choice affects the ending slides, but not gameplay because the game is almost over at this point.
Naturally, we want to do better. So in the CSG we’ll get rid of the vagueness, move the main quest to the center stage, push the factions’ quests back, and allow you to make key choices earlier and thus enjoy the consequences earlier.
It will start simple – while scavenging you stumble upon something clearly valuable, a long-forgotten device that wasn’t meant to be used until the ship landed (but can be used in-flight). Not being an expert on such things, you need to know exactly what this thing is to figure out what one of the factions will pay for it, which is a good way to introduce you to the three main factions in Act 1, whereas in AoD the Noble Houses were introduced one Act at a time for storytelling reasons (escalating events: acting on his own, Carrinas seizes or attempts to seize power in Teron; misreading the situation, Gaelius decides to strengthen his domain against the Imperial Guards and makes a deal with the Ordu; thinking that Gaelius is about to start a war, Meru throws caution to the wind and accelerates his plans, thus triggering the very war he feared.
Once you know what that device is (at about 30% of the game), you’ll offer it to the faction of your choice, at which point your relationship with the other factions will go down, introducing an aspect we didn’t really touch in AoD – factions acting against you, attacking your base of operations, and turning locations under their influence against you, which will boost replayability.
At about 70% of the game, you might realize (via learning more about the ship if you’re smart enough) that what you’re doing might not necessary be what’s best for the ship (or you personally) and get an option to do things in a very different, "fuck all factions" way. The remaining 30% of the game will be dedicated to each path within this fork, presenting different challenges and choices. So far, that’s 3 'working for a faction' paths, 3 'fuck 'em' paths, and 7 different endings without counting permutations.
This way you’ll get to play through your key decisions, instead of being told about what happened next in the slides. Obviously, the slides will still be there but gameplay-to-slides ratio will be different.
In other words, you start working for a faction of your choice as part of the main quest, which gradually piss off other factions. At first they will refuse entry (no access to NPCs which will affect some quests), then send bounty hunters after you, then attack your base. Your allies will help you defending the base, so going against all factions will be an extreme choice with extreme consequences.
