Message in "Plot"?

[Nodes]

Hell.... if you accidentally kill someone in our real life society your are still considered a murderer to some extent. Whatever you did to cause the accident, you weren't supposed to be doing it there (says the usual court ruling). Murder is not simply forgiven because it was accidental. People would chase you out of town for killing one of their townsfolk or worse! They'd probably kill you themselves in that time! Remember that this setting encompasses small towns and villages, in other words, very close groups of people that don't move from where they live and practically know each other like if the street market was an open Facebook page.

Heh, really I think i was imagining this in the heat of battle, maybe you're helping defend the village with your companions from, say, bandits. If that will even happen that is... Not in the middle of a peaceful town square. Probably should have been more specific, but, well, yeah. I guess it still really wouldn't be acceptable to the townsfolk, but i don't know.

 

[Omegoa]

That's the thing about friendly fire - it isn't very friendly. I'm curious to see how the devs decide to handle it, though the traditional method is to have allies tolerate a whack or three before going hostile.

 

[SergeDavid]

I'm just hoping there will be those one or two people that everyone is happy to see gone. Like there is that drunken mess of a man who beats his goat, a lovely dagger to the face later and his wife wishes you good fortunes and gives you a nicely tenderized goat supper.

Speaking of killing, I'd be really interested to see if we could get someone really drunk, drive them out into the woods late at night in a kart and just leave them there and see what would happen. How would the other villagers react to one of their neighbors just vanishing and how would the town economy react? And finally when he wanders back into town what kind of reaction to his experience would he have?

 

[Holy.Death]

That's totally core to our philosophy and part of what all the dynamic story stuff supports. No unkillable NPCs, no respawning NPCs, nothing like that. It's much more than just annoying, it very much hurts immersion and the whole idea that what you do matters.

I understand no respawning of specific individuals, but will new NPCs be spawned "in the background" (kind of like zombies in L4D series do) to re-populate the world of Sui Generis? With people dying being rather common occurrence I can imagine a lot of issues with [slowly] de-populating world.

 

[Cepheiden]

I understand no respawning of specific individuals, but will new NPCs be spawned "in the background" (kind of like zombies in L4D series do) to re-populate the world of Sui Generis? With people dying being rather common occurrence I can imagine a lot of issues with [slowly] de-populating world.

That could be solved by

a) having so many NPCs that even if you kill a thousand, there will still be thousands left.

or

b) if you kill too many NPCs for no reason the game will make it extremely difficult to continue this path, i.e. sending a massive punitive squad after you, that will eventually get you no matter how strong you are.


There would also be a c option. However this one would require quite a lot of ressources to program and so far no game has anything like this.

c) NPCs actually react in increasingly harsh ways to the player killing other NPCs in the world, related to them or nearby. For example if you kill 1 Person in a region or within a faction for no good reason and somebody saw you, they will look for you as a criminal. Make that a few more people 'disappearing' with or without anybody witnessing it and NPCs will start making serious efforts to find out who it was / bring that person down, like closing gates, entrances, shops, curfews etc. Now if you kill a conspicious amount of people, most of them will stop whatever they are doing and group together, even over wide areas, to bring you down. Of course this not only needs rules as to how NPCs act, but also when they will do so and when not and also needs a lot of testing whether this interferes with quests and so on. So quite a hassle.
One might argue that there are systems like that in other games, which is true, however they are all only half assed. Sure the guards might look for you, but they won't look harder no matter whether you kill 1 or 1000. Some people might refuse talking to you, which is quite bold in the face of someone who has just genocided 99% of their village. Also most of the time you can get out of trouble by paying a minuscule amount of money and everyone forgets you just killed their neighbours and splashed their brains on their porch.

So option c would be really great, but probably not within the budget.
b would be the most economical one.
a might have too much of an unwanted effect on the scale of the world

 

[Madoc]

I like your reasoning, all 3 options are pretty good in general terms.

C is the sort of thing that we're aiming to accomplish with our event system. The whole idea is that your actions have numerous realistic repercussions. It's worth noting that "interfering with quests" is not something we're looking to avoid. SG is not about completing things but stuff happening, there is no particular desired outcome. You will fail to do a lot of things for a lot of different reasons. Also killing sprees will be a whole lot harder to pull off than in most games.

 

[burgzaza]

Excellent. I'm totally fond of the option "c" ( the "b" too but it's a "c" light if I get it right ).
I remember Skyrim trying to make a criminal system a bit like this, but it was ... a bit ridiculous as Cepheiden stated. Some RPG do that ( latest I know is Wasteland 2 ), and mutch better, but it's more about different results scripted in one or several quests in a specific region or group. It never goes as far as what you two think about !
I'd be really amazed if at least a bit of that idea is happening in the game.

 

[Murf]

Yeah C is what I was hoping for when reading and hearing about the way SG was going to go. I imagined going into a town, and because I could, waylay some shopkeeper as he went home at night. Then , the next town over, his brother or what not, comes looking for him, and because I killed his brother now that NPC's goals and 'programming' have completely changed, and because his has changed that other town he is from will have changed, all because I decided I could not live with out having 5 pairs of worn leather gloves.

Truly cannot wait to throw myself into the full experience of SG.



(btw devs, if, in the course of making SG and coming up with ways to program AI, you end up creating Skynet or something like that and it eventually takes over the world. I'd be ok with that, it's a fair trade. )

 

[Holy.Death]

It's certainly a few leagues ahead of "there is no AI, everything is scripted" games. I like approach that stuff just happens and nothing is restricted, and same game can take different shapes. Sort of "nothing is true, everything is permitted".

It's probably going to stun people who expect games to wait with the narrative for them or those who consider experience points to be the integral part of RPGs, but that's why I took interest with Sui Generis: it's treading where no one, even the respected companies like Obsidian, CDPR or inXile, don't dare to venture to this day.

By the way, if NPCs engage into combat with each other can we expect different outcomes if scales are not weighted towards one particular party (like a couple armed robbers against a single poorly armed farmer)? It would make watching combat between NPCs much more interesting and dynamic. Truth to be told the fact of NPCs being able to fight one another alone over something that ain't player-related would be an impressive accomplishment in itself.

 

[Nynuc]

Im just trying to wrap my brain around how incredibly hard this will be to code, with all the dynamic events and whatnot. My only question really, is what kind of dialouge options will be available to npcs who are not particularly significant? Can we choose options like; Hostile, Friendly, and such? Will we be able to meet an npc that seems tottaly differant in ways they speak to you? The ways they react to you?

 

[Erian]

Difficult to code, not sure, as tools can also be created as to handle most of the "dynamic" content.
So far, what will be the more interesting on that track = list of functions supported.

Over TES Games, most notably the latest (and not forgeting of OpenMW, who could well be dumping quite some professional games (guess not some like this one, who are going on the "hype" track, or so it seem), as a community work done over 3 years (ok, pas si simple) has both more possibility (hm, licences, but it sound like there to, options exist).
In any case, tools, community made = TES5Edit & SKSE (for Skyrim, they have others name for older TES), who allow for deep edit & control, "cleaning" of mods, while Skyrim Script Extender is running alonside the game as to provide more functions to be supported. Which allow the community to create contents even more evolved than official are/where.

Then, it has to be seen as Bethesda is apparently weighting quite a change (pay grade over mods for RPG ???, as donation = alright, as mandatory for access ?).

To be seen, hopes up as to SG, while PoE is released tomorrow.