The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the NPCs
by jachilli
Disclaimer: I’m not speaking in any official or teaser capacity on this. This is just me talking.
If you’ve played many video games at any time over the past three decades, chances are you’ve run afoul of an NPC at some point. He probably stood there — or maybe he was extremely advanced and walked a patrol route of one to six line segments before returning on the exact same path — and asked you to do something for him. The first million times you did this, you were probably fine with it, but then it hit you: That NPC isn’t really a person. He doesn’t really care if I find his missing daughter, gather four corpse-thistles, or stick a knife in the ambassador’s eye.
NPCs make sense in a tabletop game. Tabletop games are run (in most cases) by a single individual, so all of the personalities in the world who aren’t players’ characters, are managed by that single individual. They also make sense in single-player games, in which a sense of interpersonal relationships has to be conveyed.
They are the bane of MMO design, however.
In a single-player game, this is fine. Especially a single-player game from the 8-bit era.The entire function of an NPC is to create the illusion of an interaction with another person. One of the greatest travesties in the age of internet-connected gaming is the continued presence of NPCs. Why? Because, in an MMO, you have all those other real people. You don’t have to stick content-bots on your street corner to fool people into believing other people are there. It’s because they’re actually there.
Back in 1643, when people were playing Wizardry and Pool of Radiance, NPCs were great. They took that tabletop RPG experience and let you play by yourself, assuming the role of the GM for you. They ultimately let you replicate the social activity of tabletop gaming if you couldn’t find a gaming group or had only finite time, or whatever other reason sent you to your computer instead of your gaming table.
Now, with high-speed internet connectivity, worldwide propagation, and greater numbers than ever before of people playing games online, NPCs in MMOs have only two excuses to exist:
The developer wants to dump giant buckets of exposition on its players, and uses NPCs to do the dumping via the clumsy illusion of dialogue.
The developer believes that people won’t want to fulfill the more commonplace duties of the world such as shopkeeping.
These are both bunk. Okay, maybe not pure bunk, but they’re the vanguards of developers that don’t want to let their players truly touch and shape their worlds, or that don’t have faith that their worlds are interesting. Consider the drawbacks of NPC-delivered content.
They Violate the Cardinal Rule of MMOs
The cardinal rule, of course, is “let the player do it.” With the massive amounts of people playing games, someone will take on whatever role emerges as necessary or enjoyable in the game. The tasks they undertake may be rare, but that’s okay — that rarity then becomes a facet of your virtual economy. When you have players depending on each other for in-game items and assets, you have a reason for them to be in contact with another. Playing together forms relationships, and socializing is what games are all about.
They’re the Anchors of Static, Stagnant Content
This guy is a terrible father. How many times a day, every day, can a guy lose his daughter?When they die, they respawn. A world in which named entities respawn gives the impression that your actions don’t matter. You do a thing, it resets, and the world continues as if you had never done the thing in the first place.
You can cheat this a bit with clever naming schemes or instancing, but it doesn’t change the fact that the content in question remains static. For example, you can hide a quest-giver in an instanced location so that people who have already done the quest won’t see him again and won’t be reminded that he’s handing that quest out to every SOB who staggers past him (see the point below about disenfranchising players).
Even if you’re talking about a non-combat situation, an interaction in which the NPC disappears or appears elsewhere, or whatever takes him away from his sentry point or patrol route goes beyond the border of illusion and into the realm of blatant lie. Isaac the Arms Merchant isn’t really an arms merchant. Titania isn’t the faerie queen. Agent Jenkins isn’t your SAS contact. He’s not even a person, there because of his own motivations. He’s just another game piece placed there. You’re not having an interaction with him, you’re working your way through a preprogrammed exchange.
The One Thing They’re Designed to Do, They Do Poorly
Again, this is excusable in the early days of the medium, when everything was new, or in a game without other players, where individuals trade verismilitude for the opportunity to play a game with interpersonal interactions at all. But today? When technology as simple as text chat can allow a real person to be at the other end of that conversation? It’s inexcusably lazy design. It’s unquestioning adherence to “Oh, of course it’ll have quests. It’s an MMO, and MMOs have NPCs who dole out quests.”
At best, your “conversation” comes from an elaborate or randomized dialogue dictionary that vaguely conveys a sense of senility. (I remember walking out of my apartment in Grand Theft Auto IV and bumping into a bum on the street who shrieked at me, “You can’t get good drugs anymore!” Uh, okay. You’re telling me this why?) At worst, you get a single line of dialogue over and over. And most of the time it harangues you for having not yet performed the menial task the NPC doesn’t even really care if you do.
They Disenfranchise Players
You know who already has this exact same ring? Six thousand other dudes.You did the epic quest? You fought your way to the top of the mountain? You faced down the perils of the avalanche, outwitted the wicked Ice Lords, endured the chilling winter winds, discovered the shortcut through the Rift of Frozen Souls, leaped the Hoarfrost Chasm, and finally plucked the Truesoul Gem from the deathless grasp of the Spiretop Witch?
Big deal. So did I. So did everyone who takes the quest at the bottom of the mountain, where Starchy Bushysprouts is offering it. It happens about sixty times a day. I have the exact same photocopy of the Durandal item you do. You’re not so cool.
So, What?
Despite my tone, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If “Hands off my world, you filthy, filthy player” is the developer’s intent, they’re a fine way to maintain setting integrity via stasis. Eleven million people subscribe to World of Warcraft, after all, so many players either actively like static content or don’t care. Or they haven’t considered it enough to seek an alternative. But this is also why Puzzle Pirates is a better MMO than WoW — all of the activities in the game affect the world the players share. Even if the player doesn’t know she’s creating an effect, or just wants to solo, she’s a part of every other player’s experience.
Next time, Part Two: What Am I Gonna Do About It?
At risk of sounding sycophanty (I just made that word up,) this sounds like some of the core principle behind what could be the coolest game out there. A few of the MMO design ideas you’ve brought up really touch on what I dislike about MMOs. You do these things, you have a customer, for what that matters.
That’s one of the things I really like about the perpetually-endangered Myst Online: Uru Live. The game had a grand total of two computer-controlled NPCs, and both of them were right near the beginning, in the solo learn-the-game-controls area. One makes some cryptic remarks for expository purposes (“I probably have a better idea why you’re here than you do.”), gives you basic directions (“She left a message for you in the Cleft.” “Find the Journeys.”). He’ll also give the occasional hint if you’re stuck (“Try looking in the place where you started your journey.”) All wonderfully voiced by David Ogden-Stiers. No quest windows, no text in your chat log.The other NPC is a non-interactive hologram who provides further direction in terms of what you’re supposed to be doing in the game. She’s a questgiver of sorts, but only if you consider the entire game to be a quest.When the game was at its peak, the developers staffed all other NPCs themselves, about a dozen of them altogether. No canned responses. They’d walk around and talk to people, respond to questions, describe their plans, and suffer setbacks. The only difference between them and any other PC was that most of them had avatars unavailable to players. The detriment there was that anytime one of them showed up somewhere, the area almost immediately became swamped with players. They almost had celebrity status.I’d like to see more of that in MMOs.
If other players could give me quests, then I’d see the reason for having hundreds of of other players cluttering the game. In WoW it felt like I was stuck in a lame D&D version of Disney World.
@Mearls: Interesting that you made the Disney World reference. As I’m sure you know, in MMO development, the aspects of gameplay that involve dealing with NPCs and doing quest-style tasks is called the “theme park,” since the player is effectively going on a ride and not substantially changing the environment.@Ian: I never got to play much Uru, though I did dink around with it when they finally announced that the official support plug was being pulled. Its content was a bit non-immediate for me, but I also understand that such was part of its appeal, and was supported by the ethereal, dreamlike nature of its environment. And your point about dev NPCs is valid. I think a “live team” has so much more to offer a world than purely AI NPCs.
And yet, I expect that WOD Online will have NPCs out its ass.
@Megazver: I’m not trying to duck that comment, and you’re right to bring it up, but the NDA doesn’t allow me to talk about any projects I have in progress.
I actually kinda disagree with Justin on this, but largely as a player rather than as a designer. I freely admit it’s because I flat-out, due to varying levels of experience, do not trust my fellow players to provide me with content I am actually going to enjoy. There are two basic appeals to an MMO: cooperating with lots of other people, and competing with lots of other people. Right now the people who enjoy both are pretty much set. If you don’t enjoy competition, though, there’s really nothing but static content that you can be fairly confident of enjoying without the competitive folks beating you to it, frequently locking you out entirely. I’m honestly not sure how you can strip out NPCs as a given and most other types of static content without making an MMO into something where relaxing as you play a game and finding some way to advance your character are incompatible. It’s a refuge for the player who just wants to decompress for half an hour every night and get something done. Do we want that player in the game?
I think, Ethan, you are overlooking the appeal of parallel play. Lots of people want to neither cooperate nor compete, but simply to know that other people are there. How does that relate to what I’m talking about here? Um… wait until I write part two.
OMG, tks for summing up all the ideas my friends and I have been trying to put in those hollow heads from Game Industries.A new formula for MMO MUST be created. We hope the new Star Wars -The Old Republic will change that.Great text, Justin. Kudos from Sao Paulo, Brazil.
“A new formula for MMO MUST be created. We hope the new Star Wars -The Old Republic will change that.”The Star Wars game looks like it’s mostly going to be bringing more single-player concepts into the MMO space, not less.
I never liked that mmo’s always preached about “a changing world” such changes aren’t really dependent upon the players at all, I rather like FFXI however, if enough monsters weren’t killed in each town, the country in question would lose territory. In my DnD game i currently play, a territory was almost lost, even though the “people” there weren’t real, it was a much deeper experience than “you need to collect 10 shrubs to save winters hold” Story driven mmos? that i can get behind.
Sounds good in theory, until you play a game like Star Wars Combine, where they strive to make every lame, boring & repetitive task a player’s chore. You start the game with the illusion that the galaxy is at your fingertips only to learn that all the positions of interest (Jedi, Sith, and other leadership positions) are already taken and you can look forward to operating a broken down clunker on some forgotten moon in the middle of nowhere scanning for mineral deposits- after you wait three to five WEEKS REAL TIME for a transport pilot to come pick you up. Then there is the ludicrous demands of your hobby requiring hours of “play time” every day so your PC can man a service counter or guard a building because the developers want people to do these tasks rather than NPCs. In their minds the game Galaxy will be full of 10′s of thousands of players at any one time, all of them interacting with each other for a better gaming experience. What you experience is world after world of empty streets and buildings. Your only contact with other players being through email messages or IRC rooms. Be careful what you wish for.
I just used my imagination and pretended like they were real….Which lead to really annoying side effects like “staying in town way past my level just because I /promised/ the Mayor I would help clear out that old mill.”I do wish games were more dynamic, the world responded to you and there was more variety. It would help with the pretending.But, seriously – in a way, how is this different from a game like, say, Mass Effect:? Yeah, I know I’m the only real person in the whole game – but when the other characters are believable and compelling, it doesn’t matter.
I don’t know… I don’t play to socialize with other players. I play to advance my character, make it the most badass possible, largely through quests, and then be a big bully and try to screw over other players.I’m serious. Without NPCs, I would have to actually interact with other players (aside from killing them)? I play to escape interaction. The rest of my life is so filled with interaction that I play games to decompress and be solitary.
This is a dichotomy that has always fascinated me about NPCs in video games, especially as I played more and more in the genres of both video game RPGs and tabletop gaming over the years. My MMO experience has largely been confined to WoW, but I’ve played around enough with others (Middle Earth Online, WAR, AoC) to know that its model seems to be the status quo, at least to varying degrees. I’ve found that as I’ve grown older and have less and less time to spend on gaming in general, these “theme park” MMO’s usually give you the most for your buck when measured in time spent and accessibility. Because of this, I’ve just taken it as a fact of my personal gaming life that I have to keep my character’s narrative largely confined to my own mind, as even playing on an RP server only allows actual world development in the most rudimentary of senses; you really can’t change the world around you. Back in the AoC beta, I argued somewhat vocally for an option to allow non-canonical player run “shards” that operate alongside the retail servers, but would exist on the company’s servers instead of on other player’s computers (a la Neverwinter Nights’ player run “persistent worlds”). I also envisioned giving the players access to the development tools used to make the game when they shell out the money for purchasing the game (like Bethesda games are famous for doing). In essence, give an interested player, or group of players, the tools to build the world in their own vision and control any happenings that they wish, whether that is complete autocratic control of events or allowing a more dynamic free for all where any player can influence the world. I’d allow either characters created on official servers to transfer back and forth with the caveat that anything they gain in any non-official world is deleted once they transfer back, or simply disallow transfers between the two entirely. In this way, I figured that both crowds could have their cake and eat it too: if you wanted a worry free, official iteration of the world, go play on the official servers; if you want a freeform experience, build your own world or join another player’s vision. As long as the player is paying for access to the servers, why should the developer care where exactly the player spends their time? I understand that there are risks: fracturing the playerbase so much that the worlds seem empty, or instance, or worries that access to the development tools would allow pirate versions to spring up. In my mind, though, if a developer creates a quality “theme park” to play in, most folks would gravitate toward official shards in order to get credit for world firsts or pvp in the former case, and in the latter, it might have to be an accepted fact of life. But again, in this case, the quality of the official game and company support for the freeform shards would hopefully overpower the desire to create hackneyed pirate servers whose experience is of dubious quality. While an AoC dev briefly showed some interest in the discussion, obviously not much came of it.This is a good segue for me to advance a completely hypothetical (although possibly tongue-in-cheek) scenario I might have experienced with WoW. Supposing that it might be possible to have one’s own personal experience of the game, it might be possible that I would have found the experience to be much more meaningful, allowing me to really be the only one who completes the quests and becomes the sole hero of the story. It might really be a compelling single player experience to play the game that way, when the NPCs are serving their function as they might have in the old single player RPGs. And if I played with a small troupe of trusted players who could really influence the world (via access to executive functions), it might really be a rewarding multiplayer experience, too. Food for thought, I suppose.Anyway, I suppose the point of my rambling here is that I really do wish MMO developers would seize the opportunity to tap the market of players who envision “MMO” to mean not only shoving as many players at once into a theme park world, but also meaningful support for player-driven narrative. I can hope, at any rate.
What I want out of an MMORPG, first, is a baseline play experience with a mininum level of quality assurance. Other things come second. EVE’s player-driven economy is great, but if the whole game was nullsec, think about what sort of greeting would await new players.The idea of one-use content and giving players the option of changing the setting sounds neat, but take /b/ into account — how many teenagers with infinite free time are going to be logged in with the specific goal of eating through as much of your one-use content and changing your setting in the worst way possible, specifically to ruin things for others, for the lulz?I think it’s possible you could do a player-only MMO, but I don’t think you could do it without throwing away a lot of what people expect from MMOs. The end result might be closer to the PS3′s MAG than EverQuest or even EVE.
Lots of great feedback here. It’s much appreciated, gang.To be clear, I’m definitely talking about doing something different with regard to the standard MMO presentation. I’m arguing against another theme park. The market has plenty of those and, if you watch the numbers, most of them fall off significantly after an overhyped launch as the free time included with the retail box expires.I’m looking at “MMO” as an incarnation of that term, not all of the baggage that seems to attach to it because the triple-A WoW clones have co-opted the trappings. All MMO means is “massively multiplayer online.” It doesn’t mean “go kill mobs” nor does it mean “do quests for level grind” or “character options have to fit the WoW model.”(This last one really has me scratching my head. I just re-installed Age of Conan for another go-round, and FunCom actually presents the character choices in terms of the WoW character niches. For example, you can choose the Herald of Xotli class, which the character builder notifies you is the “mage” class. “If you like mages, you’ll love the Herald of Xotli!”)It’s also why I mention Puzzle Pirates as a better MMO than WoW. It’s got a bunch of people in the game, doing all the stuff the game offers them to do, and not a lick of it is killing mobs, pawning loot, and raiding respawns.I’m wanting to put a bunch of people together and let them share the experience. I’m not at all concerned about preserving the standard assumptions of the theme park. Indeed, I don’t even believe that a heavy, standalone 3D client is necessary for an MMO.As well, a lot of what’s being discussed here in the comments makes for a perfectly fine single-player game. Eva, for example, doesn’t play to socialize, and Xavier’s example of Mass Effect doesn’t require any players other beyond the first. Romeburns has suggested an interesting possibility, and one that would almost certainly bear fruit if you could find a developer and publisher to take the risk. It’s still a bit more couched in the theme park presentation than I’m proposing here. None of these are bad ideas or bad games, they’re just a different sort of game than the one I’m discussing.Obviously, my idea isn’t for everyone. No idea is. (If you design your idea to appeal to everyone, you are quickly going to run into scoping issues ;)
May–I understand the sentiment about allowing everyone and their brother to change the setting at their whim. It’s a dangerous thing, to be sure. However, there are multiple “safety switches” that can easily be implemented. I’m going to break my cryptic tone and be slightly less vague from here on out, but I’m doing it to illustrate a point. I’ve delved into the more shadowy side of the MMO market from necessity; grad school in the health professions doesn’t exactly allow the time to mesh well with the traditional raid-oriented style of play (or “pvp ’til your eyes bleed,” either). Although the winds are changing, the time commitment for most MMOs is still prohibitive for most folks who pursue a career or professional training. Anyway, I digress. Suffice it to say that what I’ve found is better suited for small-group MMO’ing than the status quo ever could be. To combat what you’re describing, it’s a simple thing for the creator to either allow themselves alone or a small group of trusted colleagues access to the functions that can truly change the world (within the limits of the client, in this case). For example, truly deleting a spawn from the database so that it’s gone forever (or until you want to respawn it, if you choose), editing the stats or scripts of NPCs, or spawning that “Phat Epic of Legend” in someone’s inventory aren’t things that can be done unless you allow access to executive commands (these functions are what GMs typically have access to on retail servers). As another layer of safety, it’s a trivial thing to back up the database so that it can be reinstalled if one of your trusted posse decides to go crazy on you and screw up your vision. In short, it’s not an all or nothing approach. In my vision, if the developer keeps these functions on their official servers and designs a UI for a player admin to implement these, the threat of “xXL33t_KillaXx” screwing everything up for everyone is almost nonexistent, barring account hacking.Justin–I see what you’re saying, but I’m not sure it’s necessary to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to “theme parks.” I feel that what makes a “theme park MMO” isn’t necessarily that it’s a stat-based system running on a client-based shard which players access, but the level of *control* that is afforded the players to change the world. In my mind (and experience with the above), such a modus operandi is actually ideal for truly bringing PnP (at least classic PnP) to MMO. A few examples: My troupe of players decided to take on the “Big Dragon of Black Stone” which had been set up as a raid setting on official servers. I, as GM and admin, edited the NPC template so that its stats were balanced to what my players’ group of 6 could handle. I then possessed the NPC for the encounter itself, and it turned out to be one of the most amazing moments of actual RP I’d ever had, tabletop or online. As I was able to physically move this huge beast in the 3D environment, initially make her try to reason with the PCs (which unfortunately failed–their sense of justice was too strong), make her fly up into the air and bombard them with fire, and visit wicked curses upon them as she lay dying. . . I mean, it really was something else. Another scenario was when I possessed the King of the human lands, and my consigliere for the night possessed the Queen of the undead lands. We were at the negotiating table trying to prevent all out war, and the PCs were ambassadors from other kingdoms. Suffice it to say that while things might have worked out, one of our more warlike players threw the two kingdoms into open conflict. I tried my best to design an event that did such an event justice after that, but my command of programming language is less than exemplary. I think I did alright with the ingame tools, though. Anyway, they seemed to have fun. All of this was using the client of an official game, although having to operate within that client (i.e. I couldn’t spawn a castle or even move a tree) put some relatively small limits on me.Now, I realize that I’m arguing with one of the pre-eminent game designers of our generation; I’m sure my knowledge of gaming theory pales in comparison. I’m just having a hard time wrapping my head around the alternatives. I’m not sure I could adequately tell a tale of epic heroism, unmentionable evil, or even gray hat intrigue, in a game with such a simple layout as Puzzle Pirates. Alternately, I’m not sure that without using NPCs in some form in an MMO it is possible to have a good RP experience without either staffing a massive group of actors to run each NPC (which is realistically prohibitive) or otherwise leaving each NPC sitting as an automaton until someone possesses it and brings it to life.This really is a fascinating discussion, though!By the way, if my frank discussion of things that usually aren’t mentioned is pushing the envelope too far, I understand if you have to edit or delete my post. No hard feelings. I just feel that my experiences are the best way for me to elucidate exactly what I’m talking about.
How would you support vampires without the large amount of mortals for them to munch on? Seriously, who’s going to play a defenseless norm mortal?
@Link6746 : people not always wants to play superman. My experience is limited to WoW, but i often see player fishing, work as a barmaid or offer “taxi” service for one zone to another. Don’t forget also the millions who enjoy SimCity and Harvest Moon.As for the problem about NPC giving the same quest over and over again: Why MMORPG don’t let players create and share their own quests ? Why to we have to get instruction from a centralized organization, waiting x months for the next patch to get new quests ? Imagine the explosion of diversity if every adventurer/clan/guilds/princes could call others for help with a never-seen-before adventure !Some addons in WoW tried to do that but are too buggy/outdated to be used.Anyway, I really hope WoD Online will have this kind of options.
I don’t want to sound like a spam bot here (i believe we all hate those) but there’s a game i play (and got directed to this site from) called MagicDuel.com it may not be to everyone’s tastes, but other than during tutorial there aren’t really any NPC’s, the players make the quests, intereact with each other, have roles, care if you do one thing or another etc etc.You might not enjoy playing it, but i certainly do, and it also certainly encompasses a lot of your points, so if nothing else, have a look, see what you think. If you do, find me, there, be happy to chat with anyone, same usename :-)
The guy above me is right. There are about…. 5 npcs and once you kill them you never see them again. The rest of the npcs you only see once and then don’t see until you advance. MagicDuel is completely player created. The shops are player made, quests are player made, even the graphics are much player-made. It’s a player-made game. And it has one of the best communities any MMORPG (MORPG in this case) could ever have.
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