NPCs should talk amongst themselves.

[Corrderio]

Maybe. The question is how do you make it where it's not beyond annoying? Looking at you, Alfgar.

[quantumsaint]

Maybe. The question is how do you make it where it's not beyond annoying? Looking at you, Alfgar.

Randomized dialogue and randomized times, so it doesn't become predictable. Have them draw from a pool of a number of sentences (regarding what's going on in the world as well as general chit-chat), and don't have it at the top of every hour or on a set schedule at all. Maybe sometimes they go hours without talking, but other times they'll say stuff back-to-back.

[Nabiri]

I think the Adventurer's Guilds and the other guilds would feel a lot more alive if the NPCs had a line or two of dialogue they would speak aloud in /say now and then. It wouldn't have to be all the time (like spamming the same thing every five minutes), but just once in a while say something like, "Did you hear about the Garleans in Gridania?" little things like that to bring some life to the world. Text could change with future patches to reflect changes, and if someone doesn't want to see NPCs chit-chatting all the time, there could be a separate filter to turn it off.

Thoughts?

I would love this so much. As long as it wasn't spamming a ton like you said.
And I would love if it'd change to reflect new things happening in-game.

[quantumsaint]

Yoshida said recently something about changing the weather so that it takes place in cities and is more varied than the current predictable patterns, so there is something NPCs could talk about that would change often. One NPC might say something like:

"Can you believe this rain? It hasn't let up for three days."

And a nearby NPC may retort, "Tell me about it, my boots are soaked."

But it wouldn't always have to be three days, and they could program it so they would report whatever the weather was.

[Eugenics]

If we can blist npc's then i'm all for it.

[Uki]

They need to do like in the opening movie of the game, that tavern is full of life,then you go to the Uldah's one,*silence*....
How about adding crowd sfx or something like that?.

[0451]

I saw a Coblyn the other day, disgusting creatures.

[SnowTiger]

Funny story, when I first started playing back at launch, I thought the game did have that feature where npc's would talk amongst themselves...

Then I realized it was just rp'ers, and that the rp'ers had laid claim to the server I was on lol, so it was pretty common for a bit. It was kind of novel at first, but I never really saw them talk about anything all that interesting. I don't imagine the peon npc's who have nothing to do with any of the cool lore from the game being any better... Probably just generic 'oh noes evil is coming, won't somebody save us!' and blah blah blah. Maybe if it was like that mine carny troop in ffxi, than that'd be kinda amusing I suppose. But one of them had better throw a pie or something, or I'll turn on the npc convo mute toggle and there it shall stay forever. XD

So yeah, I'd rather SE just focus on the other stuff they have on their list... If they did finally get around to working on anything like this, I'd much rather they add in some quirky behavior for the mobs than the crummy peon npc's. Would be a lot cooler to see those dusty mongrels occasionally dig around at random or eat squirrels, as opposed to some lame npc granny go on about some garbage pertaining to saving the kingdom from teh evil doers. I think they killed what little mob behavior they had put in though, so I don't think they're going in that direction...

My general rule of thumb... npc's should only speak when spoken to... Unless they are announcing something of interest like those npc's that talk about the empire invasions or the battlewardens... That's my 2 cents at least. I know a lot of people really eat that micro lore up and all, but I skip just about all of the miniquest stories already... I will listen to what the actual plot significant guys have to say, but those peon npc's... meh lol.

[Neptune]

LOVE this idea.

[Carzilla]

Nice trickle down effect