Introducing the Alliance System

"Influence" is Replacing Companion Affection

With Game Update 4.0, Companions will no longer have "Affection", they will instead have "Influence". The Affection that a player has gained with each of their Companions will be converted directly into Influence at a 1:1 ratio when the change happens.

What's the difference between Affection and Influence? Well I'm glad you asked! Allow me to explain:

Whereas Affection is a measure of how much a given Companion likes you (and thus it goes up and down as you make decisions that the Companion does and does not like), think of Influence as more of a measure of the total impact that you've had upon a person. When you make decisions with a Companion, whether that Companion likes or dislikes the decision you've made, you will still build Influence with them (as your decision still has a narrative story Influence over them in some way).

Note that just because Influence goes up, it does not mean that the character necessarily likes you more, or that they don't disagree with your decisions. A character with which you have an incredibly high Influence score may still despise you, make it known in conversation, and then act upon their dislike of you when the opportunity arises.

"What about all of my Companion gifts?" I hear you asking. Good news! Companion gifts still work, they'll just grant Influence instead of Affection. In fact, in almost all cases they'll now grant more Influence than they would have granted Affection. We are making three tweaks to gift values and their mechanics:

• The base value of all gifts has been increased by 33%.
• Blue (Prototype) gifts have had their value increased by an additional 20%. Now Blue (Prototype) gifts are exactly twice as effective as Green (Premium) gifts, and half as effective as Artifact (Purple) gifts.
• Gifts of a given rank last much longer before their values start degrading, and they now degrade more slowly when they do start to degrade.

Basically, gifts will give more than they used to, you'll be able to use gifts of a given rank longer than you could before.

The whole Influence vs Affection change may sound a little odd at first, but it supports in the game's design and focus on story and therefore serves your needs as a player much more efficiently as well. It also greatly serves our second goal as outlined above, especially in conjunction with the next change on our list:

Influence Directly Increases Companion Power

In a way, Influence kind of functions like "relationship XP" with your Companion. As you build Influence with a Companion, your Influence rank will increase. Every time a Companion's Influence ranks up, that Companion gains a scaling bonus to Presence (which increases Companion damage, healing, and health), as well as bonuses to crew skill time efficiency and critical rate.

For example: when converted into Influence, 10,000 Affection (the cap for the old system) is exactly enough Influence to hit Rank 10, which equates to +500 Presence, +15% Crew Skill Time Efficiency Bonus, and a +5% Crew Skill Critical bonus.

As an additional note: We are changing the way that Presence works such that each point provides percentage based bonuses, instead of flat numerical bonuses. This more or less translates into two things:

• Sadly, the Companions of low level characters with massive Presence bonuses from their legacies will no longer be hilariously overpowered (I promise we're just as sad to see this go as you are, it provided some good times).
• Presence will scale much better at higher levels.

Companion Inherent Tradeskill Bonuses Removed

With the launch of Game Update 4.0, all Companion-specific bonuses to tradeskill performance will be removed. These bonuses were kind of nice in that they added some texture and variety to Companions, but ultimately they were very problematic and restricting for players. In many situations they created a single Companion who was and would always be "the correct choice" for any given type of job. This meant that the optimal play was to simply pile one Companion with all the jobs, leaving your others idle.

This became doubly problematic when your "correct" crafting choice also happened to be the Companion you most wanted to have with you on your galactic adventures.

The removal of these bonuses allows endgame players to work towards having a stable of maxed Companion characters that can tackle all the tough work optimally and in parallel.

The New UI: Companions & Contacts Window

No system overhaul would be complete without a slick new User Interface (UI), and to that end I present to you the Companions & Contacts UI, which by default is bound to the 'N' key (supplanting the Crew Skills window, which has been bumped over to 'B').

NOTE: This image displays the full roster of Sith Warrior class story Companion characters.

Down the left-hand side of the window, is a quick and easy-to-browse list of your available followers (i.e. Companions), with at-a-glance indicators for the Companion's current role, their Influence rank and progress toward the next rank, and a button to summon them. Clicking on an entry in the list also brings up more detailed information about the character.

We'll be doing even more with this UI post-4.0, so keep an eye out for more news on that down the road.

(The observant among you may have also noticed the "Alert" and "Contact" top-level headers. These become relevant in the new expansion story and the experience of building an Alliance, which I'll get to in just a bit)

Knights of the Fallen Empire, and the Build an Alliance Experience

Note: We're going to try /really hard/ to talk about things as generally as possible and avoid story spoilers as much as possible. We will spoiler tag screenshots, which will unavoidably contain this kind of information.

Opposing the might of the Eternal Empire is not something that one can do alone. One of your major underlying goals throughout the Knights of the Fallen Empire story epic will be to build an Alliance capable of loosening (and maybe even breaking!) the Eternal Empire's grip over the galaxy.

• Recruit Companions From Other Classes: As you seek to build your Alliance, you will meet a host of characters, both new faces and old friends, including many of the origin class story Companion characters. In most cases, these Companions can potentially be recruited by members of any class, though some Companions may be less willing than others to so readily overlook old grudges.
• Choices that Matter: Just as in the Knights of the Fallen Empire Chapters (and in some cases moreso), your decisions within Alliance content can have a considerable impact upon story outcomes. As a result of your actions, Companions may be rejected, rendered unavailable, or even killed.
• The New Star Fortress Flashpoint: Make contact with local resistance cells on six of the core worlds, aiding their local efforts to rid their worlds of the Eternal Empire's Orbital Star Fortresses. Assault the Star Fortresses over each world once you've established local support!

Alliance Building Experience

The Build an Alliance experience refers to a network of game content and story Missions that complement the storyline of the new expansion. It is within the Alliance story Missions that you develop your Alliance by building its power, and by recruiting additional galactic forces or noteworthy individuals to your cause. New Alliance storyline will be released regularly alongside the new expansion story chapters.

Alliance content begins in earnest as part of Knights of the Fallen Empire expansion. In the new expansion you are formally introduced to your Alliance, and the four major "Alliance Specialist" leaders who oversee the various aspects of each operation. In addition to the ways in which you can strengthen your Alliance on your own, your Alliance leaders will also occasionally send you special "Alliance Alert" Missions, notifying you of important events requiring your attention (generally revolving around new potential recruits for your Alliance!).

Much of the Alliance storyline will focus on the origin class story Companions, and what they've been doing in the galaxy over the past 5 years. From there we plan to narratively build upon this stable of established characters to expand the Alliance story network as the Knights of the Fallen Empire epic story continues to unfold.

Alliance stories will generally be more intimate and character driven, designed to complement and counterbalance the more ‘epic' storyline of the Chapter stories. They'll be very much about getting to know awesome characters, and controlling how your interactions unfold.

Alliance Contacts and Followers

Particularly noteworthy NPCs that you encounter over the course of your story will be tracked in the "Companions & Contacts" window under the "Contacts" header.

Each contact's entry will present a short bio, as well as a summary of important prior interactions you've had with that contact. In addition, you will have an Influence rank with each of your contacts. Helping contacts in various ways will build Influence with those contacts, which may in turn unlock additional rewards or story options. Many contacts can be recruited into your Alliance, and some can even be unlocked as Followers. Followers are Alliance contacts that you can summon to fight alongside you on your adventures (just like Companions).

You can also conveniently quick travel to any of the contacts you've established using their "Travel to Contact" button (provided that they are not otherwise unavailable for story reasons, such as you having shot them in the face).

Alliance Alerts

Contacts will occasionally proactively notify you of special Mission opportunities by sending you an Alliance alert. These appear under the "Alerts" header of your Companions & Contacts window. Clicking on an alert entry will bring up details about the alert, and allow you to embark upon the alert Mission. When you elect to start an Alliance alert Mission, in addition to being placed on the Mission, you will be automatically transported to the starting location for that Mission.

Classic Conversation Presentation

Alliance content is presented in what we've dubbed the "Classic Conversation" format, which may look strikingly familiar to fans of Star Wars™: Knights of the Old Republic™:

First, on the left, we have the lovable ship droid Companion 2V-R8. As a droid, none of 2V-R8's gear aside from his weapon ever changed his appearance, thus he only retains his weapon slot and his Customization slot (which all Companions will retain).

Second, on the right, we have Vette. Vette is an example of the most visually customizable class of Companion: one that visually expresses every equipped armor slot. Vette retains all seven armor slots, and also has two weapon slots as a two-weapon fighter. You will notice that even Vette no longer has slots for an earpiece or implants, as these items have never altered the visuals of any character.

"Influence" is Replacing Companion Affection

With Game Update 4.0, Companions will no longer have "Affection", they will instead have "Influence". The Affection that a player has gained with each of their Companions will be converted directly into Influence at a 1:1 ratio when the change happens.

What's the difference between Affection and Influence? Well I'm glad you asked! Allow me to explain:

Whereas Affection is a measure of how much a given Companion likes you (and thus it goes up and down as you make decisions that the Companion does and does not like), think of Influence as more of a measure of the total impact that you've had upon a person. When you make decisions with a Companion, whether that Companion likes or dislikes the decision you've made, you will still build Influence with them (as your decision still has a narrative story Influence over them in some way).

Note that just because Influence goes up, it does not mean that the character necessarily likes you more, or that they don't disagree with your decisions. A character with which you have an incredibly high Influence score may still despise you, make it known in conversation, and then act upon their dislike of you when the opportunity arises.

"What about all of my Companion gifts?" I hear you asking. Good news! Companion gifts still work, they'll just grant Influence instead of Affection. In fact, in almost all cases they'll now grant more Influence than they would have granted Affection. We are making three tweaks to gift values and their mechanics:

• The base value of all gifts has been increased by 33%.
• Blue (Prototype) gifts have had their value increased by an additional 20%. Now Blue (Prototype) gifts are exactly twice as effective as Green (Premium) gifts, and half as effective as Artifact (Purple) gifts.
• Gifts of a given rank last much longer before their values start degrading, and they now degrade more slowly when they do start to degrade.

Basically, gifts will give more than they used to, you'll be able to use gifts of a given rank longer than you could before.

The whole Influence vs Affection change may sound a little odd at first, but it supports in the game's design and focus on story and therefore serves your needs as a player much more efficiently as well. It also greatly serves our second goal as outlined above, especially in conjunction with the next change on our list:

Influence Directly Increases Companion Power

In a way, Influence kind of functions like "relationship XP" with your Companion. As you build Influence with a Companion, your Influence rank will increase. Every time a Companion's Influence ranks up, that Companion gains a scaling bonus to Presence (which increases Companion damage, healing, and health), as well as bonuses to crew skill time efficiency and critical rate.

For example: when converted into Influence, 10,000 Affection (the cap for the old system) is exactly enough Influence to hit Rank 10, which equates to +500 Presence, +15% Crew Skill Time Efficiency Bonus, and a +5% Crew Skill Critical bonus.

As an additional note: We are changing the way that Presence works such that each point provides percentage based bonuses, instead of flat numerical bonuses. This more or less translates into two things:

• Sadly, the Companions of low level characters with massive Presence bonuses from their legacies will no longer be hilariously overpowered (I promise we're just as sad to see this go as you are, it provided some good times).
• Presence will scale much better at higher levels.

Companion Inherent Tradeskill Bonuses Removed

With the launch of Game Update 4.0, all Companion-specific bonuses to tradeskill performance will be removed. These bonuses were kind of nice in that they added some texture and variety to Companions, but ultimately they were very problematic and restricting for players. In many situations they created a single Companion who was and would always be "the correct choice" for any given type of job. This meant that the optimal play was to simply pile one Companion with all the jobs, leaving your others idle.

This became doubly problematic when your "correct" crafting choice also happened to be the Companion you most wanted to have with you on your galactic adventures.

The removal of these bonuses allows endgame players to work towards having a stable of maxed Companion characters that can tackle all the tough work optimally and in parallel.

The New UI: Companions & Contacts Window

No system overhaul would be complete without a slick new User Interface (UI), and to that end I present to you the Companions & Contacts UI, which by default is bound to the 'N' key (supplanting the Crew Skills window, which has been bumped over to 'B').

NOTE: This image displays the full roster of Sith Warrior class story Companion characters.

Down the left-hand side of the window, is a quick and easy-to-browse list of your available followers (i.e. Companions), with at-a-glance indicators for the Companion's current role, their Influence rank and progress toward the next rank, and a button to summon them. Clicking on an entry in the list also brings up more detailed information about the character.

We'll be doing even more with this UI post-4.0, so keep an eye out for more news on that down the road.

(The observant among you may have also noticed the "Alert" and "Contact" top-level headers. These become relevant in the new expansion story and the experience of building an Alliance, which I'll get to in just a bit)

Knights of the Fallen Empire, and the Build an Alliance Experience

Note: We're going to try /really hard/ to talk about things as generally as possible and avoid story spoilers as much as possible. We will spoiler tag screenshots, which will unavoidably contain this kind of information.

Opposing the might of the Eternal Empire is not something that one can do alone. One of your major underlying goals throughout the Knights of the Fallen Empire story epic will be to build an Alliance capable of loosening (and maybe even breaking!) the Eternal Empire's grip over the galaxy.

• Recruit Companions From Other Classes: As you seek to build your Alliance, you will meet a host of characters, both new faces and old friends, including many of the origin class story Companion characters. In most cases, these Companions can potentially be recruited by members of any class, though some Companions may be less willing than others to so readily overlook old grudges.
• Choices that Matter: Just as in the Knights of the Fallen Empire Chapters (and in some cases moreso), your decisions within Alliance content can have a considerable impact upon story outcomes. As a result of your actions, Companions may be rejected, rendered unavailable, or even killed.
• The New Star Fortress Flashpoint: Make contact with local resistance cells on six of the core worlds, aiding their local efforts to rid their worlds of the Eternal Empire's Orbital Star Fortresses. Assault the Star Fortresses over each world once you've established local support!

Alliance Building Experience

The Build an Alliance experience refers to a network of game content and story Missions that complement the storyline of the new expansion. It is within the Alliance story Missions that you develop your Alliance by building its power, and by recruiting additional galactic forces or noteworthy individuals to your cause. New Alliance storyline will be released regularly alongside the new expansion story chapters.

Alliance content begins in earnest as part of Knights of the Fallen Empire expansion. In the new expansion you are formally introduced to your Alliance, and the four major "Alliance Specialist" leaders who oversee the various aspects of each operation. In addition to the ways in which you can strengthen your Alliance on your own, your Alliance leaders will also occasionally send you special "Alliance Alert" Missions, notifying you of important events requiring your attention (generally revolving around new potential recruits for your Alliance!).

Much of the Alliance storyline will focus on the origin class story Companions, and what they've been doing in the galaxy over the past 5 years. From there we plan to narratively build upon this stable of established characters to expand the Alliance story network as the Knights of the Fallen Empire epic story continues to unfold.

Alliance stories will generally be more intimate and character driven, designed to complement and counterbalance the more ‘epic' storyline of the Chapter stories. They'll be very much about getting to know awesome characters, and controlling how your interactions unfold.

Alliance Contacts and Followers

Particularly noteworthy NPCs that you encounter over the course of your story will be tracked in the "Companions & Contacts" window under the "Contacts" header.

Each contact's entry will present a short bio, as well as a summary of important prior interactions you've had with that contact. In addition, you will have an Influence rank with each of your contacts. Helping contacts in various ways will build Influence with those contacts, which may in turn unlock additional rewards or story options. Many contacts can be recruited into your Alliance, and some can even be unlocked as Followers. Followers are Alliance contacts that you can summon to fight alongside you on your adventures (just like Companions).

You can also conveniently quick travel to any of the contacts you've established using their "Travel to Contact" button (provided that they are not otherwise unavailable for story reasons, such as you having shot them in the face).

Alliance Alerts

Contacts will occasionally proactively notify you of special Mission opportunities by sending you an Alliance alert. These appear under the "Alerts" header of your Companions & Contacts window. Clicking on an alert entry will bring up details about the alert, and allow you to embark upon the alert Mission. When you elect to start an Alliance alert Mission, in addition to being placed on the Mission, you will be automatically transported to the starting location for that Mission.

Classic Conversation Presentation

Alliance content is presented in what we've dubbed the "Classic Conversation" format, which may look strikingly familiar to fans of Star Wars™: Knights of the Old Republic™: