I feel Earthbound, the classic SNES RPG where Ness debuted, is a masterclass on NPC dialogue. The dialogue is so well crafted it makes you eager to talk to each NPC you come by, knowing even if they don't give you relevant information they will give you a silly hot take on the world they occupy. It makes everything so much more rich. The Rabbit Girl referenced in the article is from Undertale by Toby Fox, who cut his teeth in gamemaking creating Earthbound mods. I suspect this is why his characters in Undertale follow a similar whimsical nature to this early influence of his. Undertale borrowed a lot from Earthbound's character construction.
I've been playing through Earthbound over the last few weeks and consistently find the writers and localization team put in just the right extra 10% to turn a "bleh" interaction into one you think about for days to come. For example, in a nod to the greedy, one character grumbles about the loan he gave to your family and now he "lives in poverty" - all while standing in the biggest house in the game.
Later on, a key item with key information gets shipped to your character via the equivalent of Fedex "Neglected Class." A rumpled delivery man eventually shows up and tells you "Anyway, he said... well... uh... I forgot. Yep, I forgot... actually I forgot the stuff I was supposed to deliver, too. I think it was some weird machine to make trout-flavored yogurt. Yeah, I forgot it at the desert... I'm not going back that way, so don't ask me to get the package... I mean, it's your package, right? So YOU go get it! Go on, get out of here." You then have to schlep to another part of the game to recover the package the delivery man decided just wasn't worth his time [0]
If you've played the game and want to figure out why some of the quirkiness just WORKS, I would recommend the later parts of Tim Roger's piece from a decade or so ago [1].
[1] http://archive.is/fMD7F (edit - huh, yeah this article has NOT aged well at all I should have taken a closer look since it first was released long ago, but I'll leave it here for the sake of discussion & derivative comments).
Agreed on Earthbound. I will add one more data point. GTA V. We learn about each character through the banter and their actions and not some long winded exposition. If there was a time I could not help feeling for the characters lately, it was GTA. They felt so tragic.
> That piece you suggest by Tim Roger is disgusting to read in its casual misogynistic violence.
I mean, he is quoting/paraphrasing Shigesato Itoi, the producer of Mother 2. The part about prostitutes only constitutes the first 2 paragraphs, so it seems unfair to make assumptions about the entire article based on the opening paragraphs (which, again, paraphrase Shigesato Itoi)
Not sure why you're getting downvoted - flippantly talking about murdering prostitutes is... not good to say the least. The choice to refer the the hypothetical prostitute as "it" is enlightening too...
Obviously written words can't literally punch you in the face, but I think that joint understanding of that is implicit when we both know that the thing being referred to is written words. Nevertheless the article pretty flippantly talks about murdering prostitutes as an allegory to games.
(I know the first part of it is a quote from the games creator, but the rest of the article continues to riff off of it without a hint of "huh? that's a weird thing to say.")
It's like you people think the world began in 2010. We've been through a drastic shift in what popular culture considers polite in the last decade. Nothing was weird about that metaphor in the nineties, it would have been seen as middle of the road edgy and nothing more.
As for "obviously written words can't literally punch you in the face"—No. That's what the theory GP plucked the phrase from implies, that hurtful language is literally violence.
I'm also fairly sure casually talking about murdering prostitutes didn't just become uncomfortable in most circles in the last decade, although I'm not quite old enough to confirm that anecdotally myself.
You can find out for yourself, if you're curious. Grab some vernacular fiction from the time period. Watch some movies. Even better, drop by a library or used book store and pick up some popular humor magazines, you'll be pretty surprised.
It wouldn't shock if after some digging you find that people of thirty years ago were barbarians. This wouldn't be the first time someone felt that about those in the recent past, but at least you'll start to develop an understanding of how quickly culture can change. The more you read, the more you'll get a sense for what changes are superficial and which are more profound. You may even begin to recognize the currents that took us from there to here.
They say the past is a foreign country, and they say it for a reason.
It has never been a respected profession. Homicide has always been an occupational hazard.
GTA3 (1999/2000?) put it into the popular consciousness by allowing players to emulate it, but IME nobody really started getting shamed for joking about it until around 2010 (coincidental to trans issues becoming mainstream?).
As fucked as this is, my distaste for this particular metaphor is somehow the thing that just triggered me to think metaphors are kind of bullshit. You can literally make a metaphor out of anything, apparently.
I'm now trying to figure out if there's a more tasteful way to make really terrible metaphors just for the sake of showing that point... I'm honestly not sure if it would work any other way but to be painfully awful though.
EDIT: I've made progress I think: It is dark humor and requires repetition, but I think what might work is some awful singular simile/metaphor that gets bent into every single shape possible by everyone, like a prostitute. Once the metaphor gets used enough, it could become a one line argument about how "your metaphor sucks."
E.g. "life is like a box of chocolates blah blah blah," and in response "yeah, life is like a prostitute..." (with no follow up). The point being, you totally could follow it up with some bastardized metaphor, but unlike the original person making one, you have the good sense not to continue.
Related: "They called it the Aristocrats"
EDIT 2: It might not have to be darkly offensive, it could just be annoying. Maybe "x is like a sandwich" or something, where you can always just add layers as though they're ingredients.. I dunno. I don't think it has the stain power, but there is a joke here at the expense of all metaphors.
EDIT 3: I THINK I GOT IT!
"X is like (an) onion(s)." Reference to the popular "Ogres are like onions" quote from Shrek. It's not quite as moldable as "prostitutes," and maybe a bit childish. But it has stain power, and could seemingly get the point across.
A really good reference for things like this is D&D's Dungeon Master's Guide. It collects a whole lot of advice about different parts of creating a world and story. It doesn't go deep, but it's a great reference.
Oddly enough, I find the DMG advice so specific to the type of gaming that sits in the general category of "D&D-type play" that I find it of pretty minor value in any other game at all.
Think of how much value the DMG brings to doing collab worldbuilding using "A Spark in Fate Core", as the prelude to a Fate Pathfinder game. Or even how much it brings to the Fate Pathfinder game.
When it comes to NPCs and stories, I find the NPC and Fronts guidance for Apocalypse World and Dungeon World to go much, much farther, and be much more generalizable. At least if you like sandbox D&D, versus railroad D&D.
We might be focusing on different parts of the DMG. The parts I focused on and remember well are the parts that have nothing to do with D&D. Take Chapter 4: Creating NPCs. The first half of it is about fleshing out memorable characters quickly, which is a skill useful for any tabletop game (or just general fiction writing). It advises you to flesh out occupation & history, appearance, abilities, talent, mannerism, interactions with others, useful knowledge, ideals, bonds, flaws and secrets, with sections of examples and tables for quick generation, as well as advice for what to focus on really quickly. Most of the rest of the chapter is the same for villains, with little D&D-specific bits filling the remainder.
Or the play style section in chapter 1, which is about how different people play for different reasons, and you should get to know whether which of your players are looking for hack and slash, versus immersive storytelling. That's even more important in other kinds of games than it is in D&D!
I haven't actually played D&D in a long time, but it's been very useful for me in other very different kinds of games, and even fiction writing. I'd recommend you take another look.
I think you may be half-right. I don't recollect the guidance on fleshing out NPCs quickly, so that's definitely something I should revisit.
> Or the play style section in chapter 1, which is about how different people play for different reasons, and you should get to know whether which of your players are looking for hack and slash, versus immersive storytelling. That's even more important in other kinds of games than it is in D&D!
I think other kinds of games these days take for granted, "this is what this game is about - you and your group should be on board for this style of play and, if not, you should definitely play a game that is suited to your tastes." Trying to use one RPG mechanical chassis for wildly disparate gaming styles is definitely part of what I think of as "classic D&D".
Agreed. There's tabletop outside of D&D and Adventure fantasy. Don't get me wrong: the genre is popular for a reason. Still, it's nice to give other worlds a try. One of my friends occasionally GMs a system of his own creation, which is pretty fun.
One example I'll shill is Erika Chappell's recent Flying Circus, which is about being a mercenary pilot in a postapocalyptic, Ghibli-esque world. It's quite good, and if I remember correctly, an airplane designer helped with a couple bits of the design.
I haven't read many other books on the topic, but the Fate Core guide book[0] is an amazing resource for this (and Fate is a great system in itself). It really goes into a bunch of detail about how to make the game fun for your players, e.g. it mentions that dying makes players feel bad, but the bigger problem is that death is boring, and it's much better to put your player in a situation where they have to be creative to escape.
I love the philosophy behind Fate, but in practice the mechanics left me cold. Writing good character aspects is trickier than it should be: there’s a sweet spot of specific enough to be limited and actionable, but broad enough to be useful in practice, and it’s hard to hit.
Then the game can be so interpretive and improvisational that it actually comes out the other side as less immersive than a crunchier game like D&D. Players spend less time role-playing and more time talmudically studying their character sheets for ways they can apply their aspects to a given situation.
In contrast, I’m a big fan of old(ish) school Call of Cthulhu (from Chaosium, not the d20 version). The mechanics are concrete, straightforward, and get the hell out of the way when you don’t need them. Character sheets embed a lot of info about who a character is without turning into a script for role-playing.
Obviously mileage will vary. Some groups will really grok Fate and love it; mine didn’t. Regardless of whether you even wind up playing the game, it’s a good read for any DM just for its take on things.
Edit to add: I’ve also used Fate’s character creation system to help make characters for short stories, and it worked really well. I’d never do that with something like a D&D character sheet.
Yeah, I think of FATE as the assembly language of RPGs. You can use it to build any experience you want but it's hard to setup on the first try. It definitely works better for short stories.
Another good resource is Graham Walmsley's "Play Unsafe: How to work less, player harder and add stories to your game". It's a short book about applying techniques from improv acting to your role-playing games to support player creativity and participation.
What I think is different between video games and tabletop RPGs is that video games have the additional constraint of packing as much as possible in the least amount of text.
With the possible exception of visual novels, no player likes walls of text, efficiency is key. In tabletop RPGs, detailed descriptions are often desireable, and not only that but GMs have to respond to players. For example, a PC may decide to rob the NPC, because why not. And now you have a whole lot of stuff to deal with: how rich the NPC is, how willing to fight, what are his relationships with other NPCs,... Video games simply won't let you do things that are not programmed.
In the article, dialog is limited to 3-4 lines. One of these tells you what your next quest is "I hear there’s a mirror in the Fire Mountains that can block its flames.". And another one mentions a red dragon. It means you only have two lines to establish a character, and if you can do it in one that's better.
Heh, I'm admittedly in the minority here, but this is part of morrowind's charm to me. No voice acting so they could have huge rich amounts of text. But I was a kid with infinitely more spare time then :-\
It depends, there are players that love learning all the lore details, the good games add additional dialog or letters/books/emails that are optional so players that are in a rush can skip them.
I think it depends on the quality of the text. Richly-detailed and well-written (read: well-edited) descriptions as well as quippy dialogue are all welcome, but the mountains of poorly-written copy you find in many visual novels are a chore. I think a lot of writers fall to lawyer-ism, which I define as the idea that you can convince someone of anything ("My characters are deep! Their relationships are meaningful! My world is complex and well-constructed!") so long as you just keep talking at them. It doesn't help that some are often translated from or imitating the Japanese expositional style, which can be long-winded.
Control, FFXIII, Fallout, Animal Crossing: Fun to read through all the extra text/dialogue!
{Vast majority of visual novels}, Mass Effect, Tales Series, {Vast majority of story-based gacha games}: Not so much!
It is your opinion, not all people are like you, but I think you can design a interface where people that want to skip this ca do it. even visual novels will give you a skip button and a log to go back if you need some information.
Not all things that seem bad to you are objectively bad, some people enjoy that, remember how you taste in books/music etc changed in time.
I agree with the idea and most of the examples, but I'd be interested to hear why you've put FFXIII in the good category and Mass Effect in the bad one. XIII has a ton of dubiously-written extra text, and I don't remember ME being too verbose or badly written (with some exceptions).
I think I’m in the middle. Play through quickly then if I enjoyed it, replay a little slower, enjoying the lore. Makes a little more sense that way too.
I generally agree and I don't like it either, except for Planescape Torment, because it has awesome characters and text.
> With the possible exception of visual novels
I never did understand visual novels. They aren't games, but they aren't good novels either. Plus I don't read Japanese, and judging by the (poor) translations out there, most "visual novels" consist of mostly pressing enter to skip tons of "..." dialogue.
I don't think I can be called a visual novel fan, only having played the most popular ones. But these most popular ones were all great.
The Danganronpa and Ace Attorney games have some really good detective stories in it - I think the overall story in those 2 series is pretty bad, but in each game, there is at least one individual case that is great; and Zero Escape is one of the only work of fiction where I thought time travel / parallel universes was done right, without loopholes I could think of.
It seems like the author is conflating natural dialogue with creativity. You can't give a character much personality in a few lines of text, so Mother-style quirky dialogue (as in the Undertale example) is one way to make your NPCs more memorable despite that constraint, but they definitely won't sound like real people or have much character. "An animal walks another animal on a leash" is a joke, not a character.
The author shows how to turn a short hint into a more fleshed out character interaction, but "personality" is limited to a trait ("brave", "klutzy") or a relationship to the player, and in an effort to convey these traits in just a couple of lines of text, they end up coming off as forced, contrived. Definitely an improvement from the walking hint, but trying to convey a personality in too few lines and having it come off as a caricature, in my opinion, is worse than an underdeveloped character.
I think another thing that could help make it feel more immersive would be a bit of unreliability or incompleteness in information gathered from NPCs. Why does every villager know that there is a legendary mirror in the Fire Mountains that can block dragon flames? Were they all at the meeting where that was clearly and repeatedly announced? Maybe instead they could be saying things like "I hear theres some legendary weapon in the Fire Mountains". "Mabel told me she heard about a a magic mirror that drives away dragons". "An adventurer came from the mountains the other day and mentioned a magical shield against dragons". Now the player knows they should hunt for something to fight the dragon, but what it is isn't clear. Perhaps the full info will come from an important NPC later.
Its fine for NPCs to be wrong on flavor. But as soon as you make NPCs incorrect on gameplay-defining moments (ex: There's a vampire weak to silver bullets ahead!!. Woops, its not weak to silver because its not a vampire...), players will get pissed off.
In my experience as dungeon master, players are very accepting of "I don't know" as a response. But as soon as you "mislead" players, they start to think of that situation as a betrayal of trust.
So "villagers don't know" whats ahead is far better than "villager MISTAKENLY thinks there's a vampire ahead".
Part of the joy of games is agreement on the parameters of what is and is not in bounds for the game. Knowing that boundary lets you focus on only the things within that while pleasantly mentally unloading all of the myriad messy things outside.
Even though each videogame is different, there is a surrounding videogame metagame culture that players tacitly assume defines what all videogames are allowed to do. When learning a new videogame, players assume the rules of that metagame still hold true. (This is one of the reasons videogames today can be so difficult for non-gamers to get into: they don't have this absorbed culture.)
One of the rules of that metagame is "NPCs do not mislead the player." (Other rules of the metagame are: "Your savefile cannot get into a state that makes it impossible to beat the game," and "It should not be required to die/fail several times in order to learn how to proceed.")
It's valid for a game to break that meta-rule, but it will be very unpleasantly surprising if they believe they are playing the stock videogame metagame as they learn this game's rules.
This is kind of unfortunate because there's a whole giant space of possible videogames that could be made with interesting rules if only you could set the expectation for players that this game steps outside of typical game culture meta rules. You occasionally see experimental games that do this like Lose/Lose, which deletes random files off your hard drive when you lose (!).
> It should not be required to die/fail several times in order to learn how to proceed.
I played a game a while back that made a sort of Groundhog Day repeated dying a requirement to make progress. That was a central theme to the game, so it ensured the player understood the situation pretty quickly.
Indeed, any time there's something that a creator ought not to do, that creates fertile ground for interesting subversion by doing exactly that thing. However, the point remains that the consumer needs to be briefed properly in order to avoid a sense of betrayal; a game like Dark Souls is chock full of characters that will lie to and mislead you, but the game does a good job of communicating its own atypical nature to the player via a prevailing atmosphere of despair and callous indifference.
I think it depends. Once it sinks in that NPCs are not always reliable (And you can hint early at that with for example someone contradicting themselves or seeming unreasonably knowledgeable), this can add another fun dimension to the game and its world and motivate players to really talk to more NPCs or ask more pointed questions.
Is talking to NPCs more fun than playing the rest of the game?
Or more importantly: is talking to NPCs in your video game more fun than top-tier visual novels (Ex: Phoenix Write: Ace Attorney, "When they Cry", or Danganronpa )?
As a player, I know what I'm getting into. I choose to play mindless hack-and-slash games because the mindless hack-and-slash is quite fun sometimes. I don't play Dynasty Warriors for in-depth stories or deep NPC character development.
In contrast, when I pickup a visual novel game like Danganronpa, I'm not really going to be wowed by difficult reflexes or hand-eye coordination.
Games exist as a drop of culture in a greater ecosystem. The ultimate truth is, your video game plotlines are never going to be as deeply engaging as a book's plot.
After all, a book has literally nothing else to go on aside from character development and interesting plot development. People play video games (or tabletop games) for different reasons.
I think there does not need to be just one or the other. Talking to NPCs is just as much fun as killing the monster and if the talk actually aids in killing the monster or brings complications, it's even more fun, because overcoming obstacles of any kind is what's fun in roleplaying games.
I am mostly focusing on tabletop here, because computer games often pale in comparison, but regardless, a good mix makes a good game.
It's personal preference if you lean more into action or social, but I find either end of the spectrum to be to limited to just one thing.
Case in point: Mass Effect, criticized elsewhere in the thread for having too much/bad text, where for me all that text (including the encyclopedic content in-game) was what built one of the most immersive and engaging virtual world I've ever experienced.
I can see that. A decent rule of thumb might be: if the misinformation would change what players do, then it's probably bad.
E.g. if one villager said the mirror is in the swamp, unlucky players might waste a lot of time in the swamp, which is bad. But saying it's an axe vs a sword vs a piece of armor vs a potion probably doesn't matter much - whatever it is, as long as it is what is required to defeat the dragon, it's fine.
Yeah, I can see how misleading can be frustrating, but I think incompleteness or inaccuracies that aren't going send the player down the wrong path can still work. "There's some sort of monster ahead!" "I hear you need a certain kind of weapon to kill the vampire." "I don't remember what he said, it was like titanium, or copper or some other special kind of bullet. You'll need to find him and ask him."
Why would the players spend more time going to a 2nd village for a second opinion?
Do you really want to run games where the players spend 10+ rolls asking different villagers for randomly generated knowledge, because they know that some knowledge is tainted?
Do you, as the dungeon master, place more tainted knowledge into the pool, or do you place more correct knowledge in the pool?
If the pool of knowledge is 50% tainted, why bother even listening to villagers in the first place? Its clear they don't know what they're talking about. Save yourself an hour of pointless roleplaying / acting out NPCs / etc. etc. and just say "The villagers don't know".
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I mean, I've had players who don't like combat and prefer running around the world doing... not adventures or something. But they're in the exceptional minority in my experience. Most players want to know where the monster is, which direction to go to fight the monster, and then to save the town. Its cheesy, but its what works.
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I have successfully run a "whodunit" scenario. Where I explicitly lay out 5 NPCs, with their own incomplete view of some situation. And the players need to talk with the NPCs at specific times (and being seen with some NPCs conflicts with other meetings. Two NPCs are enemies and will refuse to cooperate if they see you conversing with their rival).
If the players fail to find the antagonist out of the pool, no big deal. Have a "one step backwards" adventure (ex: Culann's Hound situation or similar), and then take on the antagonist afterwards.
The story must go onward. Not necessarily always in the benefit of the players, but it takes a lot of effort to craft an actually fun, good, and engaging set of "unreliable NPCs" that people actually want to play with.
It depends, if you drop plenty of hints that the character in question is unreliable/untrustworthy, or otherwise cause interesting interactions as a consequence, it can work (Patches from dark souls springs to mind)
This is something you'd have to be very careful about, since players would likely get very annoyed if too many NPC 'hints' were outright misleading. The ones you mentioned seem fine (since they're basically just 'generally right, but missing some info'), but the tendency of NPCs to lie outright was one reason why Castlevania 2 got so much flack back in the day (along with a shoddy translation that made it even worse).
Can work well for a puzzle though. Recall a few Zelda games having setups where one NPC was actually a spy for a rival group, and you needed to cross examine what other NPCs said to figure out who that was.
isn't this a pretty common pattern in RPGs? seems like lots of minor NPCs have conversation paths where you can ask them about your current story quest and they give a vague answer that doesn't advance the game. then you finally talk to the important person who has that key bit of information and your objective gets updated.
Matthew Mercer (the dungeon master of Critical Role) gave this useful tip about NPCs during a Q&A after an early episode of the first campaign : the two most important things to know about your NPC is 1/ what they want and 2/ what they fear ; after that, you can improvise.
Of course, in a video game, NPCs won't improvise, but I guess it's a useful advice to tie NPCs in their environment and not just have them being some sort of isolated entities.
That being said, as both a d&d player and a RPG videogames players, what I would really want from NPCs in videogames would be for them to stop being just "switches", which I activate using an action button and who provide always the same text. The videogame which allows discussion with NPCs to be initiated by a question asked by the player will get all my attention :)
I like that want/fear approach. Will have to give it a try sometime.
My own system has been to approach NPC definition like Telnet protocol negotiation. Probably a reflection of autism on my part because I'm now realizing my NPCs have no emotional motivators:
I can do ___.
I'm willing to do ___.
I won't do ___.
I can't do ___.
Perhaps merging these two ideas would make my NPCs more human :)
What role do you see fear playing in NPCs via video games? Outside of the occasional "scream" or "run away" I can't think of a time where I've seen fear utilized deeply via gaming NPCs
Video games don't have NPCs in the same way. They have scripts.
The key distinction being that the purpose of knowing their wants/fears is to know how they should respond as unforeseen events unfold. Real RPGs have unforeseen events. Video games have branching, but highly deterministic, events - therefore, the "NPC" just needs a set of scripts that cover those branches. You don't need to predict anything. They don't need to be characters in the way that RPG characters are characters; they need to be characters the way that fiction characters are characters.
The old sharecropping farmer may fear his landlord squeezing his finances in the fall.
The greedy merchant may fear that her husband is pissing away too much money on drink.
The cobbler's apprentice may fear his boss, because his boss is a huge, sometimes violent asshole.
These fears can add background flavour through worldbuilding, that make these characters memorable. Nobody cares about, or remembers generic merchant #2 in Bumtown, Nowhere, but they may remember if their first introduction to her is walking in to a family fight about liquor.
Even if the players never explicitly discover that fear, this grounds your design of the characters into something more interesting than "He's a farmer, she's a merchant, he's an apprentice."
I think its less about making scenarios about their fears and more about their motivations. If you know what they want and what they fear, you know what drives them to do the things they do and you can come up with responses or scripts that tie back to either a means of getting something or avoiding/preventing something they fear. Fear doesn't have to be something tangible either, but something like loneliness.
Its about creating deep, relatable (or, at least: understandable) characters, that make the world feel more alive and not just a dull response dispenser.
Long ago when I dreamed of writing a game, something that bothered me was that people kill characters they shouldn't and the flavor of the game never changes. In games where NPCs try to escape, they forget that you just tried to murder them. If they catch you skulking, they don't become vigilant. If they hear someone being killed in the next room, nobody comes, nobody hides, nobody runs.
When the mayor of a town has been killed 500 times maybe the townspeople should be deeply xenophobic. Maybe the shops stop selling weapons, etc.
Pardon the tangent, but this was particularly blatant in World of Warcraft. Because of the quests, you basically spend half your time committing genocide (wiping out some species or group). For some quest lines you have to murder your way into a place and then murder your way out of it. The irony of this is that the quests turn rogues into the least murderous class in the game, by far. They are the only ones that can reliably sneak in and out instead of murdering bystanders. This is disturbingly backward.
The other irony is that many of the main storylines are about preventing genocide. If a genocidal maniac goes around killing all the other genocidal maniacs, is it because they are good or because they are eliminating the competition?
In dnd, when you want a NPC to go your way, you can do them a favor, persuade them or intimidate them. If the players discover what the NPC fears, they can play on it. So basically, in videogames, it could offer two way of handling the NPC as well.
Cool read thanks for sharing. Probably just bias but my experience with some games man the NPCs really make the game tick. Two quick examples, hollow knight, dark souls (or all soulsborne-kiro). Both are big on exploration etc. NPC interactions are so memorable. Will never forget certain times playing, making progress, finding crazy ass new hilarious NPC.
Fromsoft has plenty of these memorable NPCs from demon souls to sekiro!
Gaah, are we really calling them this now? Can't we just say "FromSoft games"? Are we going to lengthen it even further with Elden Ring? Soulsbornekiroring games.
Most often people call these soulslikes. Kind of a dumb name and it might artificially constrain new entries to fit into a Dark Souls shaped hole (for example all these games don't have to have basically the same minimalistic light vs dark story) but well, that's how we talked about doomslike for a while as well.
Not sure what other descriptive we could use, intentional games ? The combat being more focused on giving weight to your actions vs allowing you to interrupt and change course anytime is the biggest differentiator IMO.
The problem with "Souls-likes" is it encompasses non FromSoftware games, whereas people saying stuff like "Soulsbornekiro" are referring to their games only. I think Souls-like is a fine descriptor for things like Salt and Sanctuary, The Surge, Nioh, etc. It's harder to find a descriptor for FromSoft's games. Honestly, I think tacking Sekiro on is my biggest issue, because that game is by their biggest departure from the Souls formula.
> for example all these games don't have to have basically the same minimalistic light vs dark story
I would argue From's games themselves don't fit in the simple "light vs dark" mold. Dark Souls is honestly more of a deconstruction of "light vs dark" tropes.
As a primarily single-player gamer, I totally agree. The varied impact NPCs can have on a game is awesome, an example off the top of my head that I enjoy - Skyrim.
There are hours of entertaining content [0] just based on some of the weird quirky behaviors of NPCs in that game.
I liked em. They had good character, some made me laugh (John Hancock is trying to sell insurance?) though I was just watching my Girlfriend play through fallout 4 they kept it entertaining.
"A settlement needs your help"..
Thanks Preston... Well that NPC got kinda stuck on the same topic after a while..
Fallout 76 at least had a relatively small number of players per server, so you can still largely pretend you are engaged in the main plot line by yourself.
ESO has just a steady stream of other players on the same quest chain as you, with absurdly short respawn times. You stumble on to the boss fight you need halfway in progress, help bring them down, while ignoring the other players, then by the time you loot the quest item and start back out the MOB has respawned.
WoW was infamous for the competition to get your 10 bear pelts or whatever, but it didn't feel this crowded.
I agree with all those. As a counterpoint, I felt salt and sanctuary didn't quite live up to either dark souls or hollow knight with its NPCs. They just felt kind of generic.
To add some more to your list though, Majora's Mask and Link's Awakening probably had my favourite NPCs in zelda games. Both of those games had weird trippy vibes that the NPC's helped bring out. Especially majora's mask, everyone just felt wrong and their side stories and quests really helped make the game.
Interesting. I love Hollow Knight and all of its characters but I could never take any of the From Software ones seriously (I haven't played all their games though, currently finishing bloodborne).
The maniacal laugh almost sounds like a placeholder
I’m playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance at the moment. It’s one of the best open world experiences I’ve played thanks largely to the NPCs and their stories/requirements. A smaller world, by modern open world standards, which allows devs to create a more meaningful world. Hell, I’ve spent a third of my time playing Farkle (dice) with various NPCs, simply enjoying the pub background chatter etc.
I'm also playing it right now. If you haven't gotten it yet, I recommend the DLC "A Woman's Lot". There's a full side quest where you play as Theresa from Skalitz on the day of the attack. I just finished another side quest from the DLC where you help out another woman from Skalitz over in Sasau as she gets tangled up in church affairs that I found intriguing.
There's a point at which you get to join the monastery in Sasau and I'll be honest, I just stayed there for ages going about my daily duties because it seemed like an okay life, translating illuminated manuscripts and such.
Aw, I was hoping for some approach to making NPCs more conversational.
I've been trying to use Rasa for that. Rasa is really intended for Siri/Alexa like things, or rather, it aspires to be. In practice it can do a phone tree with a few digressions. It's based on TensorFlow. You put in a list of questions users might ask, and when someone does ask, it detects which stored question is closest. So you can put in a FAQ, and people can get answers based on it.
There's a notion of "slots", so someone can ask "How do I get to PLACE", that would match "Where is PLACE" (that's the TensorFlow part) and the matcher returns PLACE, which can be looked up. I'm not sure this is much ahead of Bobrow's BASEBALL program from the 1960s.
Man, this is great. I have a project oriented to give NPC's a more human touch. The project is on a early stage, (just a prof of concept, really), but with a dialog generator, I think I can make a NPC behave's like a player in the game.
It's kinda hard cause programming games is not my real job. I work at a bank and the hours are long, but I still wanna finish this project someday and test with on a RPG.
Your project reminds me of the game Drowning in Problems. Although it has a lot less character, it still tells a rather simple story. http://game.notch.net/drowning/#
Memorable NPCs definitely make or break games, or having NPCs at all (looking at you Fallout 76!). One of the most recent great experiences has been with Hollow Knight; I got so immersed in trying to figure out more about these interesting creatures and their stories, even though they barely really had much to say in some cases. I think something that helped a lot was also how different they all were from one another.
On the other hand, a game like Zelda BOTW, I really wanted to get more into the characters, and the cut-scenes were they used voices were incredibly capturing, but then most of their dialogue then ended up just being text, even for the primary characters, which really hurt a bit at the start. The game is still one of the best ever, just wish there was more voiced dialogue.
I cannot believe that it was a monetary thing, so maybe just space conservation?
With the latest Unreal Engine demo out, I can't help but think that we've probably had enough polygons for a while. Maybe we could have a few iterations of game engines with really revolutionary procedural generation, and ultra realistic text-to-speech.
The Unreal Engine demo was spectacular. The polygons pretty much become quite noise which made the scenery look almost too real in some cases ;)
Biased, but I think Replica's AI voice will help a lot of game devs in the future to come!
Hey all - I'm Max, one of the co-editors of The Pause Button, a publication all about video games.
I wanted to share one of our recent contributor posts that I thought you'd all enjoy. If you have any recommendations for good gaming content to check out, are interested in writing for our publication, or just want to chat - feel free to commment here or email me at max@pausebutton.news
I always dreamed of building a MUD, which lives on two completely independent servers and features the same world. But players from one server would appear as NPCs (in-character descriptions would be mandatory) on the other and vice versa. That way the NPC dialogue and gameplay that would emerge on any one server would feel magical to PCs.
It doesn't have to be much. I still vividly recall my discovery of what happened when you repeatedly clicked on the same soldier in Warcraft: Orcs & Humans[1].
I've been playing through Earthbound over the last few weeks and consistently find the writers and localization team put in just the right extra 10% to turn a "bleh" interaction into one you think about for days to come. For example, in a nod to the greedy, one character grumbles about the loan he gave to your family and now he "lives in poverty" - all while standing in the biggest house in the game.
Later on, a key item with key information gets shipped to your character via the equivalent of Fedex "Neglected Class." A rumpled delivery man eventually shows up and tells you "Anyway, he said... well... uh... I forgot. Yep, I forgot... actually I forgot the stuff I was supposed to deliver, too. I think it was some weird machine to make trout-flavored yogurt. Yeah, I forgot it at the desert... I'm not going back that way, so don't ask me to get the package... I mean, it's your package, right? So YOU go get it! Go on, get out of here." You then have to schlep to another part of the game to recover the package the delivery man decided just wasn't worth his time [0]
If you've played the game and want to figure out why some of the quirkiness just WORKS, I would recommend the later parts of Tim Roger's piece from a decade or so ago [1].
[0] https://youtu.be/EIoLcNLyd0g?t=27902
[1] http://archive.is/fMD7F (edit - huh, yeah this article has NOT aged well at all I should have taken a closer look since it first was released long ago, but I'll leave it here for the sake of discussion & derivative comments).