Lifeless world ?

[Vanguard319]

I don't think it's possible to program NPCs with the ability to display random or unique behaviors. Even in Skyrim, they were limited to a preset behavior pattern that only changed if, say a dragon attacked the town, or you started killing children or something to that effect. If you are talking about NPCs that say go home and sleep at night, then that is probably doable.

Besides, you wouldn't want random behavior in an MMORPG, since it would make finding a particular quest NPC difficult if not impossible if they could travel anywhere in the gameworld, with no way to know where they may go next.

[Tonkra]

Besides, you wouldn't want random behavior in an MMORPG, since it would make finding a particular quest NPC difficult if not impossible if they could travel anywhere in the gameworld, with no way to know where they may go next.

we are not talking about quest NPC's only god damn..

there could be the old granny who is going for a walk with her dog over the bridge and around the town.. and maybe in the evening is going back into her house.

i dont care about "loop" npcs if the world seems a -little- more livier.
NPC who have no important role can roam around and nobody would have a problem with it. my opinion.

i mean in FFXI from time to time there was a circus in the sandorian city.. which was a nice goody i think. caravans or whatever.


in FFXII you also have NPC who walk through the cities.


and even with some of the quest npcs you can do this also.. how about a mysterious quest npc who just appears at night in a forest glade.... a lake or somethin... if you implement roaming npc it does not mean that all npcs have to be affected by it..

Any Quest NPC's should be static, that doesn't mean that fluff NPC's couldn't be wandering about, or only coming out at night or something.

agreed. although, as i said before. it'd be fun if there are some "special" "hidden" NPC who only appear at a certain time or anything. but that should be not the rule.

[Vanguard319]

we are not talking about quest NPC's only god damn..

there could be the old granny who is going for a walk with her dog over the bridge and around the town.. and maybe in the evening is going back into her house.

i dont care about "loop" npcs if the world seems a -little- more livier.
NPC who have no important role can roam around and nobody would have a problem with it. my opinion.

i mean in FFXI from time to time there was a circus in the sandorian city.. which was a nice goody i think. caravans or whatever.


in FFXII you also have NPC who walk through the cities.


and even with some of the quest npcs you can do this also.. how about a mysterious quest npc who just appears at night in a forest glade.... a lake or somethin... if you implement roaming npc it does not mean that all npcs have to be affected by it..

No need to rage, I just made an observation, nor did I completely dismiss the idea of roaming npcs. My point was that you have to devote a lot of memory resources to give multiple npcs in a game world AI that mimics human behavior, and don't forget that the server has to be robust enough to track these npcs, along with all the players that will be moving around as well.

Let me put it this way: If they had put roaming npcs in 1.0, you would have seen far more disconnects due to the additional stress on the servers. We know ARR will have new regional servers, and that will help, but the devs probably won't know for sure how well they'll handle those kind of loads until they do some large population stress tests, probably when the game goes into beta.

[Morticous]

we are not talking about quest NPC's only god damn..

there could be the old granny who is going for a walk with her dog over the bridge and around the town.. and maybe in the evening is going back into her house.

i dont care about "loop" npcs if the world seems a -little- more livier.
NPC who have no important role can roam around and nobody would have a problem with it. my opinion.

i mean in FFXI from time to time there was a circus in the sandorian city.. which was a nice goody i think. caravans or whatever.


in FFXII you also have NPC who walk through the cities.


and even with some of the quest npcs you can do this also.. how about a mysterious quest npc who just appears at night in a forest glade.... a lake or somethin... if you implement roaming npc it does not mean that all npcs have to be affected by it..




agreed. although, as i said before. it'd be fun if there are some "special" "hidden" NPC who only appear at a certain time or anything. but that should be not the rule.

i agree here.. things don't have to be made overly difficult to find.. but special NPCs that only show up at certain times and things make the game more interesting. Maybe static quest NPCs go to bed and there shift it replaced with another NPC? i mean common.. there is ways of doing these things without it being overly complicated... This kind of detail makes a difference.

[Wyyote]

i agree here.. things don't have to be made overly difficult to find.. but special NPCs that only show up at certain times and things make the game more interesting. Maybe static quest NPCs go to bed and there shift it replaced with another NPC? i mean common.. there is ways of doing these things without it being overly complicated... This kind of detail makes a difference.

I'd like a Mob that dropped something in large demand, but only spawned twice a day for two game hours. Ideally in some semi random order, but always right on top of the aetheryte nodes. I mean, what could go wrong?

[Morticous]

I'd like a Mob that dropped something in large demand, but only spawned twice a day for two game hours. Ideally in some semi random order, but always right on top of the aetheryte nodes. I mean, what could go wrong?

maybe a few feat away from the node, haha, but yes, make the world more dynamic, random timed events! we are asking for very simple events! one NPC/MOB! not huge hoards of attacks (which was possible in FFXI...) MAKE IT HAPPEN.

A guy fishing for the day that only shows up every few days, gives you a side quest, an NPC walking from one town to another whistling on his way there. people interacting in a bar instead of staring into dead space...... some kid out searching for mushrooms who gets lost and needs help finding her way back to town (she gets lost often :P). these things cant be difficult to make happen.