06-01-2009, 01:52 PM
Dustie Wrote:This makes me think. What if you took questing as we know it, and flipped it up side down? What if NPCs came to players looking for quests. Players could then give them missions like "bring this wood back to my base and I'll reward you."That's basically my old "NPC henchmen" idea.
Like every player has 5 NPC henchmen (or more likely a variable number depending on something-or-another). These henchmen exist in the world 24/7 and do whatever you want. Mining, guarding, running supplies from one location to another, etc.
"Use NPCs to take the tedium out of gameplay" is one of my core requirements for a theoretical game. Anything that NEEDS to be done but is decidedly boring to do can be handled by NPCs.
But rather than actually assigning you a henchmen, we could take your idea and basically make it to where you negotiate with NPCs in towns to go do stuff. You select from a list what you want them to do:
"I want you to gather ___ logs of wood from [drop down list of nearby forests] and bring them to [drop down list of depots you own within range of the selected forest]."
The NPC will then offer to do it for a price based on distance, work, danger and how much they like you. Asking an NPC to help you kill the dwarf king might cost more than asking him to walk 10 feet outside town and chop down a bunch of trees. You might even have faction with individual NPCs such that you build up a rapport and they're willing to do more for less money, provided nobody kills them overnight. (And once they like you enough they may refuse to talk to anyone else for some time after their last job, in case you want to give them more work. Or maybe they'll say, "Well, I was kind of waiting for Slamz to come back, but I'll do this for you if you throw in another 10 silver.")
If nothing else, the fundamental thing we're establishing with this forum is that these games could be a lot cooler if developers would spend some time thinking about ways to make NPCs more involved and more interactive. They shouldn't just stand there for 6 years giving out the "fix the windmill" quest.