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Malena

Villages need to be populated with "decoration" NPCs

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People would quickly learn to ignore the same old, same old prescripted NPC behavior. I feel the same way about the horses and animals in-game, they just stand around and do nothing. We already have dogs - do they enliven your deed? No they don't. Start this idea by making a smart and responsive AI for the stuff we have before adding more and more cardboard people, I say.


 


But there's a simple way to address the problem of so many lifeless buildings and towns: add decay on deed. Then you would either see players caring and repairing, or crumbling ruins. The easier it is for single players to build huge castles and villages, the more lifeless the game will seem. Though I don't want to advocate the maintenance playstyle, I think a lot of people are just building too grand for the heck of it, and it ultimately creates the situation where you have impressive villages that seem lifeless.


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But there's a simple way to address the problem of so many lifeless buildings and towns: add decay on deed

What quicker way to knock  a huge chunk out of AB Code Clubs revenue, than to remove one of, if not the primary reason many people are currently paying for deeds? I hardly believe that I am alone, in that the main reason I have an actual deed, other than changing my spawn point, and more importantly, is the removal of decay. That is what I am directly paying for.

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Tower guards is the answer.


 


Also, free wildlife around, like dogs, deers, unicorns.  Ive had all those roming around freely in my deed, and they do liven the place up.


 


+/- 1,   I dont think adding a cosmethic NPC type would break the game by any standards, but I also dont think that is really needed, since you can get 5 NPCs walking around with just 1 tower.


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The horse foals are the only animal NPC that I've seen that does ANYTHING other than randomly decide to move to a new grazing tile.


 


A dog that really livened up the place would know that I had been more than 10 tiles away from him for more than 10 minutes and upon my returning to within a tile or two of him, would run around, bounce up and down and behave as a pack animal that was happy to see me.


 


The foal animation is adorable.  Would love to see the same concept applied to dogs.


 


Sorry if this was a slight hijack, not my intent.


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I see your point, but what's the meaning when this is a multiplayer game? When the meat of the game lies in the interaction between actual people any NPC's placed in the game world might as well be bricks. NPC villagers may look like players, walk around like players and occupy buildings like players but it would always be evidently clear that they aren't players, and any town populated solely by these buggers would eventually seem just as desolate as they are now. It might be interesting at first but once we're used to seeing them everywhere they'll just be set dressing serving to remind us even more how empty the village really is.

There's also an issue in that the resources for village NPC's might have to be pulled from the server's animal cap. So if we got to have NPC villagers bumbling around our towns it might be at the expense of animals to breed or hunt.

Also, I can't speak for everyone but while I agree it's nice to have newbies around as company, I believe inviting them to your towns is more a question of helping them get set up with Wurm since solo play is darn unintuitive and the starting areas are often terrible. That and, you know, making new friends.

Desolate towns cannot be remedied without recruiting, I can't see any other options. I'd prefer to introduce as few player-character substitutes as we can get away with. The routine of continually inviting players to hang around the surroundings of your deed while learning the ropes, as well as moving between deeds, is something I see no problems with. A newbie gets a smoother start of his experience when he has a village to spawn and seek shelter at, you get company for a duration of anything from a week to years depending on how close friends you become.

I have a vague idea of a feature in which your deed becomes an optional first spawn point for some fresh players, but it might not be what you're looking for.

Edited by EliasTheCrimson
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B) In the case that I did happen to be super social, the only people who would be interested in joining my village would be new players who didn't know any better. They would only stay a while until they realized they could make their own deed and life on the deed would be an endless cycle of exhaustion in trying to find new villagers, help them get set up and see them leave. Doesn't sound like too much of a battery charge to me! 

 

I get what your saying on the running a village thing, I did it about 2 years ago and got up to 13 villagers, and it was exactly as you said a headache. I just hate human npc's with a passion, including guards (although due to certain gameplay elements I will admit their necessity for now).

 

 

What quicker way to knock  a huge chunk out of AB Code Clubs revenue, than to remove one of, if not the primary reason many people are currently paying for deeds? I hardly believe that I am alone, in that the main reason I have an actual deed, other than changing my spawn point, and more importantly, is the removal of decay. That is what I am directly paying for.

 

Same here, if not for the decay thing I wouldn't bother.

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This wouldn't hurt as long as they are mostly decoration. Could connect them to titles of villagers maybe, a villager who is master blacksmith could summon a blacksmith villager etc, Would make it one more thing to work for. 


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+1  The more immersion the better.  Personally I'd love to see a smith swinging a hammer in front of a cluster of forges at my workshop, and hearing that clanking sound.  Make them non-targetable for combat, and make them dismissible.  Deeds have a tile to creature ratio recommendation to avoid disease and excessive death of animals, so why not add a tile to npc ratio cap for deeds.


 


At the end of the day I see it like this:  if you don't want npc's, dont buy any.  What you do with your in-game money is your choice.  If you like your village void of activity and wandering npc's, so be it, it's your money and your village. Not to mention npc contracts would be another money sink in the game to fuel trader reimbursements and give people more ways to spend their in-game coin.  However, if you would enjoy having an npc or two to bring life into a village, by all means buy some and plant them, it's YOUR MONEY and YOUR VILLAGE.


 


I've walked into many deeds in my time on Wurm, and thought to myself "what a pile of ###### place this is with no creativity and no activity."  Immediately following that though is the recognition that it isn't MY deed and in Wurm you have the freedom to do as you please with what you create.


 


-1 to all the haters who hate just because they can.


+1 to more freedoms and options to fill out your deed anyway you choose


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I can't see what it would pose many problems. lets face it we have trader and merchants, plus the only reason I made a guard tower on my mountain deed was to make it feel populated.


 


As stated, not everyone wants people to live in their deed and anything that brings more immersion to the game is a plus..


 


Although, server clutter may become a factor again, which Rolf combated with the token selling. Everyone have npcs hanging around deed would add up.


 


I like the Idea though.


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Nah, NPCs should serve some function: bartenders (who feed newbs for free and vets have to pay for food) or whatever.

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People already have difficulties with fps drops when entering villages with more than a couple of houses. I doubt that NPCs would really add to the experience of people with less than high-end computers unless something also is done to reduce the resource drainage. Other than that I think it's counter-productive to try to simulate company in a multiplayer game instead of actually getting company.

The NPCs would work as decoration for a while I suppose, then you'd just become tired of them and they'd be simple statues with resource draining animations - Just like the HotA statues were. To be honest their movements were more unnerving than interesting. It doesn't feel like you have company and it doesn't look like you have company, they're just statues that move about for no reason.

If your village is empty and desolate it will still be empty and desolate with NPCs. It might fool a newbie the first time it enters a village, but they'd quickly learn that the more NPCs there are in a village the less actual people there are. In effect it'd actually end up making your village look even more desolate... Plus that they'd probably die the fps drop death upon entering and not actually be able to go through the whole village in order to look at it.

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i foresea lots of lag for a bit of flavor -1. instead of npcs that do nothing im more for more creatures and 1 or two more uniques

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If adding NPC's doesn't affect resources I see a few options:


 


Ways to obtain a NPC:


- buy like trader (money sink)


- reward with title (50 skill = 1 NPC, 70 = 2, 90 = 3)


 


Functionality:


- act as a way to replace the forum adds: The owner could set a message (tools and prices) to the NPC. The player could place an order through the NPC.


- customized interaction. The owner could set his own emoticon messages (Friendly-Neutral-Angry), max 10 each. There could also be a dial to set the NPC's mood (affects % chance a message of above mood category)


This way interacting with an NPC can be very random and you can be very supprised what an NPC answers :)


 


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-1


 


My area is more than populated enough. Adding more NPC's would just be confusing, taxing on the servers, and possibly make it harder on new players to find villages. There are plenty of deed owners already that aren't inviting anyone to live in their village because they can just buy most of the services they need. If they could just buy a Master Blacksmith NPC, why would they offer to let an amateur blacksmith come live with them while they focus on gaining more skill? If they put Priest NPC's up for sale that sell enchantments, well, that will make all of us who prayed daily for months useless. So yeah. Guards and Traders are all the NPC's we need IMO. We could probably even do without the Traders, as I enjoy actually trading with players a lot more than I do with an NPC. As for Guards, they do come in handy, when they aren't stuck in a mine.


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-1

 

My area is more than populated enough. Adding more NPC's would just be confusing, taxing on the servers, and possibly make it harder on new players to find villages. There are plenty of deed owners already that aren't inviting anyone to live in their village because they can just buy most of the services they need. If they could just buy a Master Blacksmith NPC, why would they offer to let an amateur blacksmith come live with them while they focus on gaining more skill? If they put Priest NPC's up for sale that sell enchantments, well, that will make all of us who prayed daily for months useless. So yeah. Guards and Traders are all the NPC's we need IMO. We could probably even do without the Traders, as I enjoy actually trading with players a lot more than I do with an NPC. As for Guards, they do come in handy, when they aren't stuck in a mine.

 

  A cosmethic NPC shouldnt be more taxing on the system than any mob.   Mobs and players on-deed already have a system to avoid over-crowding (animal ratio).

OP talks about purely cosmethic NPCs, I doubt that NPCs that replace the work that players do will ever be implemented, and such idea would be met with huge resistance by the community,  more importantly, thats not what the thread is about.

 

"We could probably even do without the Traders", A way for players to sell their produce, without spending their playtime waiting for customers to arrive, or going where customers are is very needed, not to mention that people from many diferent time zones play.   The advantages of having an NPC to sell player made goods are obvious, specially in such a slow paced game like wurm.

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-1 


 


Makes me feel like Will Smith in I am Legend...


 


fred_i_am_legend_poster_by_sleepadf982-d


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This won't work, won't happen, and should not happen for several reasons.


1- There's the same reason why we have a animal ratio, a server-wide animal cap and a limit to on-screen objects. The client and the servers can only handle so much, and adding more stuff to render, and worse, to animate, would be probably technically impossible at least for wurm as is today.


 


2- Wurm is suppsoed to be totally player-created, player centric, and 100% free, do-it-yourself mmo sandbox. If we add decoration NPCs then next (well some are already going for that) people will be wanting quest NPCs, and next thing you know, you'll be playing your base normal, cookie cutter MMO. I'm all for "simplifying" wurm a bit adn cutting the fat, to make it more streamlined and easier for new players to integrate, but this isn't really there.


 


3- There's too many conservative players, and sadly too many of them are buddies with or actual devs. There's little to no chance that such a thing will ever happen. Just look at maps, we got a half-assed, half-done, useless crap that was a waste of dev time, simply because the devs, and those players that have the devs' ear as far as feedback is concerned were against in-game maps. And in this particular case i have to agree with those players. Wurm is not a place for that.


 


This makes sense in session based/single player sandboxes like terraria, minecraft and such. But on Wurm which is MMO with persistent world and persistent servers, this is not only a added load on clients and servers, but also a step outside of what the game is about.


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Kruggan you made me laugh and that's hard to do.


 


I like the concept but not enough to strain the system to have it.


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KanePT, I agree and disagree with parts of your post.


 


1- Cosmethic NPCs would not cause any more stress than regular mobs, its 1 simple model, 1 or 2 simple animations, and 1 simple "roam" script.  All the tools are in-game, with the exception of the model.  A cosmethic NPC, that cant fight, should be even lighter on the server than a mob, a guard, or a templar, and equally taxing to the client as a regular mob.    As such, its easy to avoid excecive models using the same animal-ratio system.


 


2- I agree that NPCs with functions would be go against what Wurm apparently aims, the OP is not talking about NPCs for quests or any other function as such, purely cosmethic, like statues.    What people may or may not suggest in the future is only speculative derailing the thread, under that line of though any and all suggestions can be made invalid.


 


3- You are right, although it seems as though the team is trying to revert that image.... at least the newest additions to the team,


 


The most thought provoking point you raise, is the fact that Wurm promotes itself as being mostly player created content.   But as long as NPCs stay as decoration, they become like a new type of fence, a new model of a statue, a new colour of wall.  In the end they will just be another tool for players to work on their creations.


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Eh. One of our villagers has 2 banners close to the token and from what I can tell their little flail in the wind causes visitors to die the fps drop death when coming too close. Pretty sure that animated NPCs wouldn't be any easier on their PCs.

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-1 

 

Makes me feel like Will Smith in I am Legend...

 

fred_i_am_legend_poster_by_sleepadf982-d

 

You made me laugh a lot, thanks.

 

 

And once again having NPC just to make look a town like if theres people there, is just plain sad, plus the totally opposite of a MMO.

 

And why not spam some statues, put them names and talk to them? Would be the same plus without needed to invest our few dev resources.

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Kruggan you made me laugh and that's hard to do.

 

I like the concept but not enough to strain the system to have it.

LMAO :)  Thanks man.

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