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Sunday, July 28, 2024
Character limit
I have been playing a lot of Unicorn Overlord. During the game you can recruit up to 70 different characters. Characters can, by fighting together in the same unit, develop social relationships, which are then shown in little cutscenes. Your main character can also develop a rapport with them by giving them gifts, or they can eat together in a tavern. It's all rather nice, and a good way to get players to think a bit more about their characters than just identifying that guy as "the tank". Until it stops feeling nice.
In Unicorn Overlord you can unlock both an increased number of units, and an increased number of characters per unit. But the maximum is 10 units of 5 characters each, or 50 characters. Which means that in the final chapter you already have more premade characters than you can fit in your army, and that doesn't include the option of hiring random mercenaries. It becomes more of a hassle to switch characters in and out of units to keep everybody at a similar level.
And of course the character relation stuff also starts going over your cognitive limit. You simply can't care about how each of 70 characters relates to the others, and you can't remember all of those relations. While it is lower than Dunbar's Number, that one is for social relations with real people. The number of characters you can remember in a work of fiction is lower; by season 8 you have forgotten most of the people from the first season of Game of Thrones, except those that are still main characters and haven't gotten killed off.
I'm in Albion, the last kingdom of Unicorn Overlord. And I just can't be bothered to deal with the new characters still arriving. I simply don't want to get to know them anymore, don't want to learn how to integrate them in my army. I think I'll just optimize my army with 50 characters, and stop switching characters in and out. Too much is too much, and sometimes less is more.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:37 AM Permanent Link
