NPCs in WoM can use animation packs, just like players. This is a lot more noticeable in AO, as there are more NPCs capable of it, but there’s a number of NPCs in WoM too. I’ll be excluding preset NPCs from this, such as King David.
The randomized NPCs that can use animation packs appear to be civilians, as well as magic council guards, soldiers, captains, and majors.
With that out of the way, I looked into which restrictions each of the anim packs have as to which attributes of the NPCs listed above correspond to which anim packs. The results are as follows:
Boss: Seems to be used by only angry personality NPCs.
Cute: Seems to be used by only female NPCs, regardless of personality.
Coward: Harder to identify due to the lack of walk or idle anims. Best test is to aggro the Silent Tower guards. Seems to be used by only nervous personality NPCs.
I would say that the easiest way to identify which animation pack an npc has is to talk to them.
Ones with no animation pack will wave at you
Ones with the coward animation pack will nervously fiddle around with their hands together
Ones with the boss animation pack will cross their arms and look away
I don’t remember what the cute animation pack is but they have a really noticeable idle animation anyway.
Also, you can always identify the personality of the npc to find out. This can be done by reading their dialogue, looking at their facial expression, or in the case of certain npcs, checking if their name is either one of 2 shades of green or alternatively pink.
That’s not how talk anims work. Talk anims are always based on their personality, regardless of anim packs. Any NPC can use the talking anims, unlike anim packs. For example, the boss anim pack’s idle is crossed arms, and not all angry personality NPCs have crossed arms when idle, only when talked to will they play the talking anim.
For the record, smiling personality will wave, nervous personality will hold their hands together and look down, angry will cross arms and tilt their head, and bored will scratch their head.
Identifying the personality is easy if you memorize the lines, or just clicking on them to play said talking anim.
I don’t have any anim packs myself so I didn’t know that player talk anim can change too
But yeah, any pos rep NPCs that isn’t MC you can identify 2/4 of the personalities (smiling and angry) easily. Bored and nervous are both the same color so you’ll have to check their face
Yeah I enjoyed looking at npc dialogue in WoM so I did like looking at personalities.
I was very surprised when I discovered that the faces actually changed based on the personality
It’s an easy detail to miss for most people, but it makes sense.
The only exceptions are bandits and dark wizards, who actually always have an angry face regardless of personality, so you have to check the lines and animation to distinguish them.