RTX 2014: SotA interview with Finn

VideogameHourLive did an interview with Finn at the RTX 2014 event!



Interesting tidbit:
- He talked about the ability to kill certain NPCs in the game and trying to solve how that would work in a multiplayer game.

While the easy out is to simply respawn the NPC which kills immersion and our actions having no consequences, perhaps they're trying to tackle this problem without respawning? Will certain NPCs suffer permadeath? How will that affect someone else's ability to perform the quest? Or do they do something like Skyrim does with its Radiant Storytelling and other NPCs take over the quest (which, shameless plug, is something that can be done with the SmackTalk system for PC/NPC and NPC/NPC knowledge transfer through the conversation system and NPC schedules).

 

Yeah the big respawn problem... I would absolutely hate it if those NPCs as well as "important" monsters would respawn. This would mean that everything you do in the game has no consequence. Aside from setting a flag to trigger the next quest phase your actions would not matter at all, which would be really horrible and destroy the atmosphere as well as the immersion and also ruin the credibility of the world.
If you kill an NPC or a boss monster it should stay dead for you just like in a single player game or how The Elder Scrolls Online handles this.

 

The problem with killing NPCs online is that it can be exploitable / griefable. Imagine you need to get a quest from an NPC and someone is standing there kill it for experience every time it respawns. Or just to do it to you.

Instead of allowing NPCs to be killed outright over and over, perhaps it would be better to have a mission that gives random bounties on NPCs for dark/criminal flagged players to give those sorts of players a more meaningful way to role play in non-PVP towns.

 

Yeah, we already saw what happened in the alpha if you can kill NPCs. There are no more NPCs.

 

The problem with allowing players to do anything they want is that they rarely act like a responsible person....people WILL kill all the npc's in a town if they can.

 

The problem of "doing it like Skyrim" is that NPCs which are marked as essential just don't die. They kneel down and after a couple seconds they are at full health again for no reason and without any exaplaination.
That makes the world feel plastic, and you can smell scripts at every step.

In my opinion, Morrowind got it quite right. Kill an essential NPC? You are doomed but you can go on if you whish. Can't complete a quest because you killed a bunch of random NPCs? Sorry, but apart from reloading or cheating you don't get a second chance: maybe you will learn a lesson about responsibility and consequences.

Unfortunately I don't see how you could make it work in a multiplayer game.

 

I didnt like how he said they try to keep the good elements about UO, it seems not true from what Ive seen on the forums...

 

if they allow attacking of the NPCs that should flag the character for PvP so that the player community can try to defend the NPC in the town.

 

That's the burning question I'd really like to see discussed further. There have been some ideas discussed in other threads on this but would love to hear more on this from the devs.

So here's the dilemma: Which instance? NPCs persist across instances. If the NPC is killed in one instance, how will it affect the same one in another instance? What if you exit the instance where the NPC got killed and re-enter it another time and that NPC is alive? If you're in a separate instance than the one where the NPC was killed, does he automatically go *poof* and disappears in yours, or will he only disappear once you exit the instance and re-enter it?

Lots of questions and lots of complexities around this. The single player offline game can be solved -- be it unkillable or permadeath and abandon your quests. But the multiplayer and instanced aspect makes this a fun challenge to solve.

 

A player who unlawfully killed a npc could be flagged as a murderer or an outlaw and therefore chased by the guards around and get arrested and attacked by everyone first.
The murderer or outlaw flag could be set for a very long time. Forever seems a bit too harsh.

 

I was talking about the moment the guy attacks the NPC he gets flagged. If I see somebody trying to kill a shop keeper, I would want to defend the shop keeper before he gets killed.

So I guess this would only apply to those who are in the same instance as the person and can see the person.

 

If the player can be resurrected why can't NPCs be resurrected, too?

This was a question one of my friends asked me years ago when we were playing D&D...

 

I think it definitely add some nice additions to the conquest part of the game if there is any.

 

If they allow NPCs to be killed permanently, then I do not believe this punishment of immediate aggro on sight is too harsh. They can mitigate this by limiting this to the victim NPC's family or friends or guards that witness or know of the crime. Otherwise the killer should be able to wander the world or even into the same town freely. However, news can travel from NPC to NPC and town to town, so perhaps the more valued / important / popular the NPC, the more widespread the effect of gaining aggro-on-sight wherever you go, or even being hunted via bounties by NPCs or even PCs.

Don't think that will work, as you're punishing all other PCs that simply happen to be in the instance and now that NPC is dead to them too, but other PCs in other instances are not affected.

I believe I have a solution to this problem though which I've touched upon loosely in other threads. And yes, it involves the SmackTalk system

Richard and Tracy spoke briefly about this in one of their video hangouts here, where avatars are immortal and the native NPCs of New Britannia are not. There were implications on story and how NPCs dealt with avatars and death but it was all very vaguely described.

 

Fin is super good and energetic in front of the camera, I'd love to see more from him!