Quest Immersion

In a world that's constantly changing, it would be fitting to have npcs acknowledge or react to the changes being made by players or even reacting to those players themselves. I had an idea recently that I'd love to hear some thoughts on. The idea is players getting mentioned in quests, particularly high ranked players in influential positions within the world that would have a reason to be mentioned in dialogue. For example if an npc quest giver making a passing remark complaining about the mayor of the node you're currently in increasing taxes, or guild masters might be mentioned when a merchant talks about the ongoing war between two nearby guilds being bad for trade. I think this would not only be immersive but also exciting for new players to know they can meet that same mayor or join that guild master's guild and maybe one day THEY could be the one having an effect on the world. What do you guys think?

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Dygz

That is basically StoryBricks.
The Ashes devs will not be making the AI that complex.
It would be great for an MMORPG to have AI that complex, though.

Camthetrashman

Dygz wrote: »

That is basically StoryBricks.
The Ashes devs will not be making the AI that complex.
It would be great for an MMORPG to have AI that complex, though.

No nothing complex as that, just having players occasionally mentioned in npc dialogue or npc dialogue that would trigger based on certain events.

Dygz

NPC dialogue triggered based on events is probably moving into StoryBricks territory.
Especially the example of an NPC feeling some kind of way based on high taxes.
But, NPCs do mention us by name sometimes.

Camthetrashman

Maybe I should clarify, the NPCs don't "feel" anything it's just a generic response based on player action. Mayor increases taxes, a couple random NPCs can now play a prewritten response of "Mayor [Player name] increased taxes! I knew I shouldn't have voted for him!" I don't know much about StoryBricks but from what I've seen it looks wayyy more advanced than what I'm suggesting.

Dygz

That means the NPCs feel that high taxes are a burden and feel they wish they had not voted for the Mayor.
I don't think the Ashes devs are planning to implement that level of AI.

TeamVASH

I don't this will be implemented but I think it's a really good idea!

Noaani

Dygz wrote: »

That means the NPCs feel that high taxes are a burden and feel they wish they had not voted for the Mayor.
I don't think the Ashes devs are planning to implement that level of AI.

No, it means the mayor increased the taxes which triggered the script on the NPC. The NPC's code doesn't even need to look at what the tax rate is, all it needs to see is that the rate was increased.

This would be nothing at all like StoryBricks.

All this would be is setting up a number of dialogue options for various NPC's that are only triggered when specific conditions are met - such as only being used for 4 days after the local nodes taxes are raised.

HumblePuffin

I had never heard of storybricks before. It looks really interesting and I’m sad they aren’t working on it anymore.

I feel like this has to be in the realm of possibility of them to do if they are already working on implementing bosses doing different actions based off of various actions of your party. Sounds like something they already have in game.

I think the stuff Steven was talking about is closer to story bricks than some dialogues linked to if the tax rate went up or down.

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