Calling them smart is setting an awfully low bar ngl.
The best thing the NPCs do is fill the environment, they are literally just background characters and I think that’s immersive as hell, but I don’t exactly fond over their presence. 99.9% of Roblox games just do not have these kinds of things so another Roblox game going without one is no big surprise to anyone. They are nice to have but it’s a minor quality of life thing, like ambient noise n whatnot.
they were cool when i first played but once i started leveling i realized how soulless and boring they were, after all whats the point of hundreds of dynamically moving npcs if none of them have anything new to say?
so yeah, its safe to say i wont be missing them, they were a cool idea but in action they turned out to feel even more lifeless than a simple static npc
Npcs were really fucking annoying to do quests with because of the fucking sleeping mechanic (not to mention that it causes your computer to combust because of the 300+ npcs running at once)
Characters that give quests, sell things or give dialogue not moving doesn’t really ruin immersion much, and honestly makes me feel a little nostalgic since AA had this same exact thing.
Due to the amount of times I got a quest from NPCs only to come back to find them sleeping so I couldn’t complete my quest, I absolutely won’t miss them.
No, I won’t
None of the NPCs really meant anything to me except free exp and crowns. None of them other than KDS, exiled and mino had anything memorable nor individual about them, to me they were just a randomized face and name that were more often than not impatient/rude civilians that asked me to do menial tasks then went to sleep for 10 minutes. After a while all the dialogue lines begin to repeat themselves or blend together.
I’m looking forward to NPCs that will actually mean something to the world of the game, even if it’s in a miniscule way; ones that have names and memorable dialogue and don’t just exist for the sake of existing.
Dynamic NPCs was an ambitious idea and I appreciate the amount of creativity that went into making them as well as they were, but imo nothing beats ol’ reliable npcs that’ll be there every time you return to that island.
If it weren’t for Catean’s Comprehensive Guide on NPC Personalities, I’d hardly even realize that NPCs had personalities in the first place tbh. They’re interesting, but not interesting enough for me to overlook the many qualms I have with them.
Dynamic NPCs only changed the npcs from bland stationary npcs that don’t do much to bland moving npcs that were 10x more annoying to deal with while causing your server to combust.
The amount of map that we have in WoM isn’t even 1/4th of the total map. In that space there is 300+ npcs all active. If the full map was done then your computer would die from trying to even start up WoM.
Dynamic npcs sound good in theory but were awful in execution. The whole point was to make the npcs feel more alive, but because all of them were just generic cutouts they ended up feeling more robotic than static npcs. At least with static npcs you can give them cool stories and lore so even if they don’t move around you can still imagine them as real people in the world of the game. They did make committing acts of terrorism 10x more fun than any other game so ill give them that
yeah i agree, this says what i said but worded way better than i couldve worded it
This time we have essays on wether a person should be sentient!
Imo it was a cool feature for wom, it made things feel a lot more alive, and it also caused some pretty funny moments.
But of course it caused some annoyance as said 826 times in this singular thread.
Smart NPCs my fucking ass they would slam their faces into every fucking surface imaginable and get stuck in some of the weirdest places. Having to wait for shop npcs to get to work, though cool and immersive, felt more like a chore cause whoopee fucking doo Quandale Dingle the Alchemist has to get his 10 hours of shut eye before I can enchant my shit time to afk on a roof
after a while they just kinda blend in with the background, and the only thing i’m gonna remember them for is some mild inconvenience whenever it was night time
the smart npcs in wom were, on paper, a great concept thatd add life to the magius map, but when executed only served as a way for money and exp, were soulless copies of themselves and was dead weight to the games performance. there were so many active npcs in the map that there really wasnt anything memorable about a certain npc, because they were copies with no unique dialogue of their own
the idea of moving npcs could be improved with a little more effort, but as divanochi said, nothing can top the standard stationary characters
I only liked their dialogue
Despite expectations, the ones in AO have a lot more soul to them.
They were really cool on paper but it just caused lots of problems like lag or not being able to talk to them when they’re asleep so you cant shop or even complete a quest.
At first i would miss them because immersion coool and badass (it made being villian feel like 50x better) but also lag, it gets boring overtime, waiting several fucking minutes just to upgrade my gear jesus christ, and other shit. I think it would be way better if AO went to deepwoken route or smth and added randomly spawning events besides random hostiles littered around the map or smth but thats just me 
The rival system’ll be a lot more interesting than some doll npcs
It is theoretically possible to have a mixture of both, but that would likely require storing a few NPC’s in each individual player’s save file, and depending on how big a dev wants to go with the idea, it might be unpractical and laggy. It would also mean that the NPC’s would be asynchronous between save files, and if a server has a maximum limit of saved NPCs (which it must, for sanity’s sake), the server will have to manage the number of NPC’s that appear. I can think of two ways:
Have each individual in a server see different NPCs
Have each individual generate a random amount of their own personal NPCs such that the total amount of personal NPCs in the entire server does not exceed the maximum.
The first has the advantage of almost guaranteeing that every player will see a saved NPC in a server. This could be a pro or a con. In a game like AO, where the player is an explorer/adventurer, it wouldn’t make sense if saved NPCs were seen in every single game instance. Crews already exist, so those don’t count, anyway.
The second is what Vetex is already doing with the rival system I think. Each player has a chance of having their rival spawn in the server, and this chance is probably affected by the amount of total rivals already in the game. He’d just have to extend this to all NPC types. The only problem here is that you also don’t want the player to be able to theoretically store an infinite amount of NPCs, but the player might notice whenever it is that the upper limit of stored NPCs is reached, which will bring immersion to a screeching halt. This could be remedied by simply making the chance of storing an NPC absurdly low (like, less than 10%). Creating new space for new NPCs could be done by implementing an NPC death system, where a saved NPC can die while you are AFK or while you are in a server (either by a player or NPC), and would then be scrubbed from your save file.
Only problem I guess is that it still won’t beat normal universal NPCs, since with this mixture the NPCs would be memorable but unique to each user, and so they would be unable to garner as much memorability in the fanbase as a whole. Sigh.
nah Imagine killing a hoard of pirates just to catch the quest giver sleeping