Naoki Yoshida recent interview

[KisaiTenshi]

Yes please.

That -IS- how NPC's worked in Ultima 7/7.5 and 8. If you stole something, your (NPC) party members would also just spontaneously leave you and you'd have to convince them to come back.

I've yet to see any CRPG or MMORPG ever do this since. Most NPC's are "nailed to the ground" because they are actually part of the game map, and not dynamicly placed by the server. FFXIV V1.0 's version of FATES(you manually had to join) and V2.0 's FATES were the only exception to this nailed to the ground issue. But they're not really what we're talking about.

Imagine this:
If you started a "new" game, and were just "dropped" into the world. All the Players and NPC's have the same color names so you can't tell them apart. There's no global chat, only /say and link-shell. The entire game requires you to have an 8-player party for all content. To dynamically create an 8-person party all you do is flip a switch and the 7 closest people/npc not in a party with a "auto-join" switch on will join and the content will commence. Your only ability to tell if a player is a computer controlled or not is by asking questions about the world outside the game. eg "How old are you? Where do you live?"

It is a great over-simplification, but this is part of the entire "dating game" genre, where you try to "win over" certain npc's by either being nice, or helping them, and in turn they will willingly help you. In this theoretical game, autonomous computer controlled characters keep schedules like real people, and are actually in demand. Most content could be cleared with an all NPC party, though coordination would be made easier with real people. There are entire games out there already that are basically "dating RPG"'s which western'ers tend to think are a joke. The entire point of that aspect is you don't get to be a jerk to -everyone- , you can completely ignore every npc character and play only with other real people that you met outside the game and likely get through the content much faster.

But I think we're a long way away from simulated worlds that actually have function. A lot of what existing MMO games do is setup goalposts for the ride, and you're just along to push the start button. There can be quite a massive improvement in how player-npc interaction works. There's just not much will to do it because we're still viewing MMO's as games that are full of throwaway props and dolls.

As for VR. I predict it will be even less popular than "3D" is. Sure there will be people who actually buy the entire getup of head, hands and legs. But for all practial purposes, go ask anyone who has ever bought gym equipment what they do with all that crap after a week. It collects dust. Nobody wants to bother "suiting up" to play a game. The proposed VR stuff just isn't going to happen unless they invent an entirely different kind of device that is contained in a helmet. Like think about how expensive a "SLI" setup is already, and now figure out how to stick that on someones head. You will not be buying a 300$ laptop and plugging an OcculusVR into it. You wll be required to buy two of the most expensive video cards available at 1000$/each just so that each eye sees 120fps and you don't get sick.

Gaming has phases.

Adventure games all had a massive die-off due to the internet making it easy to just goto gamefaq's and solve the game so what used to take 3 months to finish could now be finished in about 2 hours. They came back as FPS and Platformers with RPG mechanics thrown on top just to pad the time out, but mostly Adventure games exist as a facet of RPG's or as a narrative switch in other games. There's not much puzzle solving anymore because the puzzles can just be looked up online.

A lot of "edutainment" also had a massive die off, despite it should be massively more successful on mobile devices. The reason? back in the 90's you had to learn to read and type to even play these games. Now both of those issues don't exist on touch devices that can be narrated.

The vast majority of mobile shovelware exists because developers are trying to make a quick buck, and is due for an Atari Shovelware video game crash. Caught in the crosshairs of that will be every game that adopted the freemium business model.