Over at the MMO Round Table boards, we’ve got a lovely little thread going about what people hate about MMOs in general or one MMO in specific. One of the points brought up by Kendricke is the lack of NPCs on boats, which reminded me of the one and only time I ever got to speak with an MMO game developer (read the thread to see my post).
This has lead me down a train of thought about illusion is games. World of Warcraft has admitted to doing it, and spectacularly I might add. Ever flown the griffon? Some of what you see isn’t really… real. That’s why there will be no flying mounts available in the original game, only in the new expansion lands. Because if you could fly in the old world, you’d be able to fly right up to those matte paintings that make you think you are really seeing what you aren’t seeing.
Other games inexplicably, haven’t used it in places I would consider pretty obvious… like the boats. In just about every game I know that has boats, the boats have no crew. The reasons are simple enough, crew = NPCs, and NPCs can’t do things like zones, and boats, being objects themselves, can’t have pathing lines on them. Essentially, the boat itself is an NPC (usually just not targettable or fightable), and the game doesn’t support having NPCs ride other NPCs. But it doesn’t have to. The boat is a model. The model has moving parts (sails, rudders, oars, whatever). So why not fake the crew by making them part of the model. We are talking advanced stuff here, just tiny things like putting a captain at the wheel, a guy in the crow’s nest, a couple of guys in the rigging, maybe a cook down in the mess/hold area, perhaps a swab scrubbing the deck. Why not? Would it really be that hard?
Once you start down this road, it opens up so many new ideas… like, you know those buildings in town that are there just for effect? The ones you can’t go into? What if, instead of being just dark and lifeless, during much of the day and early night, have an NPC “spawn” in front of the window of another window, only this one with an animated texture that occasionally shows a person walk by, or flickering light… or if the normal window texture is a closed shuttered window, the new window NPC could be a matte painting of an open window that shows the interior of the room.
So many things, so many little touches, could be added to a game to make them feel more alive instead of the rigid merchant filled ghost towns they usually are.
One comment