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:
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Have each individual in a server see different NPCs
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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
the only fun part about them was how you could torment them tbh
They really helped with immersion. It felt like they were actually minding their own business instead of sitting in the same spot all day waiting for the player to show up.
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Immersion my ass it was only annoying to do shit
every time you had to travel 5 miles because some guy was shitting himself cuz there’s a bunch of “big bad guys everywhere”, and made you waste 20 minutes locating some random dark wizards and get back just to make you wait another 20 minutes since the npc decided to go to bed.
It made it annoying to grind too cuz the pathfinding breaks from stairs or counters and sometimes shop npcs will just wait by shit just to go back to bed once they finally moved again
I’m so glad we got stationary npcs instead of having to waste almost an hour waiting for the alchemist to finally stop being asleep or high just to get fucking hard enchant on weapons
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