Random Echo Bazaar observation

[sholio]

Does anyone else find it creepy that when you get to high enough levels of the game that you can afford to obtain things like henchmen and urchins ...

a) you buy them in the market like every other item, and

b) they show up in the "pet" slot of your inventory?

I choose to think of it as "hiring" rather than "purchasing outright", but at the very least they should give you an "accomplice" slot or something ...

Comments

[tessercat]

Yup, I quite agree.

[sholio]

It's just ... a very odd design choice; I feel very strange about it! Being charitable to them, I can imagine that they might have designed the system for pets only, and then got the idea of adding henchpeople/accomplices at a later date, and had to find somewhere to put them without restructuring the game design. (The whole game, overall, seems to be built on a modular setup, designed to accommodate new cards and inventory items and storylets as needed.) But the end result is very discomfort-inducing. I'm glad it's not just me!

[varadia]

It used to be 'companions', but then they instituted the Constant Companion and changed the name of the 'regular' slot to pets.

It was a weird choice, I felt.

[sholio]

Ohhhh! So basically it's the reverse of what I was thinking -- not the pet slot being reverse-engineered to accommodate other sorts of companions, but the other way around.

It does seem like a very strange choice.

Constant Companion, hmm? I don't think I've encountered that yet.

[tessercat]

Oh right. That's one of those "person of some importance" story lines. Expensive. >.>