One of the complaints I hear all the time regarding realism in video games is the complaint about static NPC’s. This issue is usually evident mostly in RPG and adventure games with large, persistent world open to exploration, and quest driven missions. In many games, all the prominent non player characters are nothing more than static quest dispensers. They always stand in the same place – day or night, rain or shine, and never move away from it. A lot of people argue that this kills the realism of the game. Especially if the game does simulate passage of time and the day/night cycle.
For example, Morrowind (one of my all time favorites) does have passage of time, but it does not seem to affect any of the NPC’s. The quest giver always hang out in their respective houses, and you can stop by and trade with them, or take quests in the dead of the night if you want to. The regulars of the local taverns, seem to have no lives and spend all their days in these establishments. The only people who actually walk around on the streets, and random nobodies who never have anything interesting to say, and guards.
Other games employ roaming NPC’s. In Fable for example, if you visited a village in the middle of the night all the stores, and important public establishments were closed and very few people would walk around on the streets. So if you wanted to trade, you just had to wait till morning. The NPC’s also had their little schedules – they would take breaks, walk around and etc.
Having this sort of setting makes the game feel more alive. But then again, it also may be more annoying. If you desperately need to unload some loot, or get debriefed on a quest, but all the stores are closed, and quest giver is sleeping, you are essentially stuck. Furthermore, most games won’t let you sleep or meditate (or whatever you do to skip forward in time) in a public place without violating the law, and your closest accessible bed might be a long treck, and few teleports away – and you probably won’t make it there and back before the next sunset. So what do you do? You aimlessly wander around amusing your self by kicking chickens (well, at least that’s what you do in Fable), or try to look for the nearest monster spawn point to do some grinding.
So say what you want, but sometimes having a static NPC quest giver who has no life, and nothing better to do than to sit around waiting to give you more work is a benefit, and a player convenience. This way you can sell the loot, get a new quest and get on with the game without some artificially imposed idle time built into the game. Sure, having the characters roam the world independently, and live their own AI life is a nice touch that makes the world more believable. But are static quest dispensers really such an atrocity?
What do you think? Do you absolutely loathe having static NPC’s in your game, or are you ok with them for the sake of convenience?
[tags]npc, roaming npc, static npc, morrowind, fable, rpg, computer role playing games[/tags]
I guess it depends on the game. In the Zelda games that support time changes, the characters are dynamic. but then again, the game eventually gave characters the ability to control time. so waiting for a store to open isn’t a big deal
I agree that it depends on the game. If waiting for a certain amount of time to elapse doesn’t interfere with the flow of the game, the added realism is welcome. If standing around with nothing to do while waiting for the sun to rise becomes a pain, get rid of it.
Oblivion Fixes this “complaint” pretty well… as when you have to follow people it has to be at certain times, and sometimes people are in bed and stuff…
[quote comment=”5192″]I guess it depends on the game. In the Zelda games that support time changes, the characters are dynamic. but then again, the game eventually gave characters the ability to control time. so waiting for a store to open isn’t a big deal[/quote]
Is that in the new Zelda? I have yet to play that.
[quote comment=”5203″]I agree that it depends on the game. If waiting for a certain amount of time to elapse doesn’t interfere with the flow of the game, the added realism is welcome. If standing around with nothing to do while waiting for the sun to rise becomes a pain, get rid of it.[/quote]
Yup – that’s what I’m saying. Sometimes having static NPC’s is not so bad.
[quote comment=”5228″]Oblivion Fixes this “complaint” pretty well… as when you have to follow people it has to be at certain times, and sometimes people are in bed and stuff…[/quote]
I have yet to play Oblivion. But I don’t own an XBox and my PC is not able to handle it. :(
I just recently… acquired.. oblivion (offline games make things easy ;) ) Its pretty much amazing
I had a long comment about the ever-roaming NPCs of Animal Crossing (and why it made perfect sense for them to be that way, considering how small the place was) but also the annoyance of going to the shop late at night to sell some fish and finding it closed.
I went on to elaborate on how I would find space to store fish so I could go back for more, by turfing items out of my house to open up some floorspace, or putting items in letters to make use of the extra inventory slots for letters and clear space for fish.
However I once again put in “noob” instead of “n00b” and when I hit the back button my comment was gone :(
But the main points are covered here anyway
Oh man… I might need to remove that word from the list.
there are a few words like that… and i hate how it erases everything when you click back… the old system didn’t do that.
Oblivion is pretty amazing. Things like being able to see things far in the distance that you can travel to are great, and the open-endedness of it is fantastic. The number one complaint that I have is that despite all the graphical wizardry, every single character looks like they’re horribly diseased. At character creation, instead of making a character that looks cool, you’re attempting to find a character that doesn’t look deformed.
Heh! Morrowind had the same problem. The original character designs looked horrid. It took 2 or 3 very well made user made mods to get the game looking the way it should.
Honestly, thats very true, but the vampire guy (if you went down a bad path like i did you know who i am talking about) looks very vamperish :D
I’ve always thought the villagers in Black & White looked deformed
Ugly, ugly people…