Relationships in Portia: The Good, the Bad and the Loot!

My Time at Portia has now been updated to version 3.0! We bet many of you have already discovered that you can make friends with the NPCs in town, date them and even marry them. We’ve also seen some of you asking, is there more we can get from interacting with NPCs?

The answer is yes! Relationships in Portia are not just about dating. They also encompass the different types of relationship that exist in real life. Romantic relationships make up just one part of your social life in Portia. Building and maintaining a healthy friendship with any of the NPCs is going to bring benefits to the player, especially on rewards after completing orders, daily expenses, and even the character’s statistics.

We have different design paths for different NPCs. In fact, if you reached a certain level of relationship threshold, all the NPCs in Portia will bring you benefits. One example is the owner of the Round Table, Djiango. If you reached the level of ‘friendly’ with him or an even a higher level, he’s going to give you a discount if you have dinner at his restaurant. And of course, the higher level you achieve, the more discount you’ll get. For another example, you can earn get extra gold or extra reputation after completing orders, or you can increase character’s attack attribute by building up the relationship with some NPCs. What’s more, we’ve designed several specific AI behaviors for some specific NPCs, so that they can come to you and ask for a date. Well, we’re not going to fully reveal these designs just yet , we want to leave a few surprises for you when you arrive in Portia.

We've considered whether this relationship design pushes our players too hard, cause, you know, different NPC can give you different benefits, and it takes time to build up relationship with just one NPC let alone many different residents. Players might freak out when they finally find out the NPC they’re socializing right now cannot bring them the rewards they want, so they’ll have to find a new NPC to interact with. And as we mentioned, we’re not talking about socializing with just one or two NPCs. We’re talking about a bunch of them.

With My Time at Portia we want each player to have a unique experience, finding friends and even rivals and enemies through their interactions with the various townsfolk. So if you do spend time getting to know an NPC and end up taking a dislike to them, don’t be disheartened! This is all part of your character’s personal journey and their time at Portia.

This feature is already in the current alpha 3.5 version. Of course, we’re going to continue to tweak this feature a little in the later updates based on community feedback, so we need your feedback and suggestions. If you have any advice or suggestions, you’re welcomed to leave us message about it, tweet us at @MyTimeatPortia or email us via admin@pathea.net.

We look forward to hearing your experiences with this feature during your time at Portia.