Player characters = npcs when not logged in game ?

Could Shroud of the Avatar game have this kind of feature for player characters to turn into non playing characters when not logged in ?

something like : When a player is done playing , before logging out , he or she could choose an option to log out normally as usual or log out and keep their character in game ( and set a proximate duration for the offline player /online npc status ) until they log back in ... and choose what to do as an NPC.
As an NPC they could perhaps interact with other players online... being a crafter npc (repairs) - vendor npc .., house maid or vault guard ... or house guest... or a hero for hire to go on adventures with other players but ... doing so as an npc , or just go to a local tavern and get hammered with ale or mead or whatever there is ...

upon logging back in players would check-collect items from adventuring or get gold from sales or see them hangover from intense drinking parties... and get some exp also ^_^ was this asked before or mentioned idk.. couldn't find it ... i'm sorry if so...

 

Doesn't Age of Wushu do something like this?

It is an interesting idea. Could we choose a profession for ourselves and then our character then poses doing that while we are offline.

But if there are a million players, wouldn't we be adding a million NPCs into the game? Wouldn't things begin to feel very crowded?

 

There's been talk about doing this for the dev player characters which they've thought about doing initially as non-controllable ones with canned responses like all other NPC bots. I don't think they intended this to work for regular players but I think it's a cool idea.

It would be great if we could have programmable AI for our "npcs". We can program our own keyword responses and schedule (what, when, and where).

 

I'm excited for players to be able to become co-authors of the world and add to the lore, and if there's any good reason for multiple characters on an account, this is it. Would also make sense to have some control over hirelings this way, and be able to customize the hirelings.

 

Rewind to 1996 when Darksun Online, when one of the first graphical RPG's began (yes before Ultima Online). When players logged out of the game their characters remains standing around doing virtually nothing. Imagine the enormous amount of sleeping player characters standing next to NPC's. It was hard to tell who was who and it made the game seem lifeless in a kind of mocking caricature of itself. Regardless of how many people were actually online it always made it feel like no one was online.

This was a failed experiment in my opinion and instead of having player character "stay inside the game" I'd much rather see players exit the game gracefully. None of this "disappearing" stuff...I think players should be encouraged to "goto sleep" in either a bed or an Inn. If they are out in the middle of no where I'd like to see them take a nap on the ground and have some kind of animation show them die and decay. If players logged off inside of a town, I'd like to see the NPC's come by and try to wake them up, then march them off for loitering.

But I would not like their lifeless shells to "hang out" in the game indefinitely.

 

I'd generally agree but think about this: There is no difference between an offline PC that's just standing or sitting there and not responding to you vs. an online PC that is idle or /afk. We might as well put an /afk tag in their nameplate and you'd never know if they're online or offline.

I do however like the idea that PCs that log out decay and die, preferably in a melting bloody mess which you can subsequently loot for some sort of reagent like blood moss

Seriously though, it would be neat to have some lore-based mechanic that shows PCs logging out besides just going *poof*. It could be as simple as falling over (playing dead emote) and then fading out in a ghostly blur or as elaborate as the game taking over their character and forcing them to walk/run to the nearest lunar rift. This begs the question of how we continually exit and re-enter the world of Novia and control our avatars, but I guess that's a different topic.

So if they do implement an offline PC mode, I agree PCs should not be lifeless and immobile characters. Either make them alive by allowing us to chat "through" them using a mobile/web app, or make them mobile by giving them a schedule to run through each day, even if they don't respond to you. When we're in public spaces, we pass by dozens if not hundreds of people each day, yet we don't interact directly with 99% of them. Are they lifeless NPCs to you? Did that break your immersion of real life? Why would that be any different in the game?

Sure, if you attempted to make direct contact, there would be an expectation of a response so perhaps we can have canned responses or perhaps we can configure keywords to respond to and act like NPCs. Perhaps we can inherit the parser and a baseline set of keywords that all NPCs know.

Extending it further, what if all the keywords and their responses that we learned from NPCs can be repeated to other players if they happen to ask us the same thing? Isn't that how real life works? We learn something and teach others. Yes, this is SmackTalk in action, utilizing the Knowledge Graph aspect of the system. Note to Lum: it's not only just about leaving "fun" messages with the barkeep for your friends

 

I'm schedule my PC to run back and forth through the street naked, all day and night, without sleeping, until I come back ;> Seriously, though, this would have to be handled with a lot of forethought and care if it were done, giving people specific rules they can set.

Anyway, I'm not sure what the right way to do it would be, but it would nice to be able to contribute to the game world in some more persistent way.

 

this is a great idea but there are lots of issues which would have to be worked out

For example, if your character gets hired what happens if they die? do you get a penalty for that or is it the person hiring them? how does it effect your kama if someone who hires you turns out to be evil and kills all the NPCs where you are a paragon of good?

For harvesting what is the point of players doing it if you can set your character to do it while your asleep?

 

Well, i think that's the main point to think about. If Avatars doesn't "stay" in New Britannia there's no point of talking about this. Anyway, i think it's a wonderful idea, so let's suppose our characters stay even when we don't play.

I think the main point of this is to make cities more alive, and we should avoid it having any purpose besides that. At the very least, i'd like for my character to stay at home/room/tavern of my town of choice, and to yell/invite whoever entered the building. That way metropolis supposed to be occupied by players like Ardoris would appear populated.

Thinking big, I'd love to assign my avatar an offline routine. Our characters adventure and work while we're online, why not allow them to be free and enjoy their lives when we're not? I'd suggest to make a way of scripting/recording a daily "routine" to our characters, as for some dialogue tags and answers. This routine could include things like sitting at home, go to the market (but never buy anything), go to the tavern and have a drink, practice combat against a dummy (but once again, not gaining any experience), and some other. Dialogues could include a greet, some stuff to say while you wander around, the answers to the most common tags, and any other sort of information (your offline character could promote the events you're going to make in the future, or the vendor where you sell your stuff). Of course, the main concern is to do it in a way we're sure most "awkwardness" is prevented.

It's probably looks like lots of work (and for sure it is), but it has further appliactions, since there are lots of player owned towns. Probably some players don't care about their NPC's but i'm pretty sure others would love to give their PoT depth through it npcs. This scripting thing could be offered to the owner of the PoT as some town interface, allowing them to be a bit of a GM in their own PoT.

 

How interesting, I just posted this in the other thread about what I would say as an NPC. Clearly the GMs wouldn't like me in this case

I am generally not for player characters to remain in the persistent world while logged out, but that was because all other MMOs had a server / map limit which our characters would hog precious resource. Since we're instance based, this might work out, though with heavy restrictions

I'd say if they were to implement canned responses, it would be a very very basic kind of response that had to fit within a limited character set.