I am going to list various details about NPCs in the game that I have noticed. If anyone knows anymore feel free to share.
Morden has a sleeping animation
Iris is slightly shorter than the player
Dialogue for criminal’s final words and them being saved from an execution are related and come in pairs. If they would say a certain speech before dying they will also say the corresponding line if they are saved
Randomly generated permanent NPCs like deckhands or rivals have a certain style with what they wear. For example, my rival only wears orange and has mostly sailor/pirate related clothes
The big one: Randomly generated NPCs have a specific personality. It is much harder to test this in AO compared to WoM so I will say what I discovered in WoM and hope that it still applies. NPCs have one of 3 personalities: happy, sad and rude. There are several ways to determine the personality of an NPC, some of which no longer apply. One way was looking at their name. If they were not a criminal: pink/unfriendly rep meant rude, pale green/friendly rep meant shy and a brighter green/protector rep meant happy.
Civilians would have their personality based on their surname. In bell village, anyone with the surname Arbor would be happy and anyone with the surname Drake would be rude.
Now for the things that do still apply. The animation pack of an NPC would depend on their personality, most noticeable being their animation when you start talking to them. Rude NPCs would use the boss animation, shy would use coward and happy would use default.
The most obvious way to tell the personality of an NPC would be their dialogue, since the only randomly generated NPCs that you can actually talk to are merchants and deckhands, you can only get a few lines of dialogue from most of them, but they can vary greatly, especially the rude dialogue.
Finally, the most obvious, but the one that surprised me the most: facial expression. NPCs with a happy face are happy, sad face are shy, and angry face are rude.
I don’t know how this would really affect gameplay but it is interesting to know. The only gameplay related thing I can think of is some sort of challenge to reach level 125 while getting all of your gear from merchants, except that if one of them is mean to you you fail or something like that.
Anyway, I hope more people appreciate the effort that went into NPCs and I hope someone has found some other detail that I don’t know about yet
Most NPCs were just standing on the road staring forward in groups of 3, whereas now they atleast control boats
The only thing that made them feel more alive was:
The fact that they could fight eachother upon seeing, not just attacking eachother (I pray for the day that comes back)
And the civilians in towns moving around (good except for the shopkeepers )
This part is tied to the NPC’s personality, like the rest of the NPC’s dialogue. The execution lines are split into multiple sentences, in order to not have an extremely long dialogue line. This is why the dialogue lines are connected.
Actually, NPC have four personalities. Both bored and nervous personalities share the pale green (friendly) reputation. In AO, nervous NPCs were mostly removed, with two exceptions:
Bounty NPCs can be nervous, though they always have angry faces. Nervous criminals always have insane laughter.
The other place to find nervous NPCs, oddly enough, is on the Ravenna Deserter crew, where you can find NPCs with the nervous face.
In AO there’s also a new talk animation (thinking). In WoM, you could occasionally find a civilian using that anim, but aside from that, no NPCs used the think anim. However, the think anim does not appear to tie into any personality
Actually, I hadn’t noticed that all Arbor civilians were smiling personality. I have to check that out at some point. I think it applies to all NPCs of the surname, including combat NPCs.
Not always, though coward anim pack was used only by nervous and boss by angry. However you can find both of the personalities using default anim packs. Did you know only Magic Council NPCs and civilians can use anim packs?
Like I mentioned earlier, bandits and dark wizards in WoM (and bounties in AO) only use angry faces, but still maintain their personalities. The other NPCs apply to the face rule. Deckhands seem to have some sort of discrepancy though where their anims don’t always match their faces (such as a bored face deckhand playing and speaking an angry personality voiceline, or an angry deckhand using smiling lines, etc)
I am so glad that someone else paid a lot of attention to npc personality. It is clear that i didnt find out everything but that just means that there is more to discover
)