Here finally I arrived at a place called “town” in an MMORPG world.

And there they are… the citizen of this town.

Standing there, whether it’s day or night, rain or sunny, never left their place.

They never walk to any part of the town.

You know exactly where to find them.

No social life, no need for food.

They can’t leave their places, so even if they had a problem, they would need your help to do it for them.

Including delivering items to other citizen.

And they are called NPC.

Well that statements, are not originally come from my mouth.  It’s from one of my friend.  And I have to agree with him.  Most of today MMORPG design their NPC as a talking statue in a place that they called town.

The illustration above is not an actual GE conversation with NPC.  I’m just giving a sample of nowadays typical NPCs and how quest is sound weird because of their “busy” reasons.

When I played Ultima series, there’s an event and quest, where I have to follow a man, pay attention to his social life, search for some place that he visit before, and take away an item from there.  The man that I followed was NPC!  That man has social life, he wake up in the morning, has a breakfast in his home, go to his shop, open and do some transaction, close his shop, go to a pub, and before he went to sleep, he go to his secret place where he store his valuable stolen items. 

It’s repetitive, but still it is better than just seeing a character that standing in a place that called town.  Better in terms of making the environment lively.  What we called town, should not only consist of walking players, but also some NPCs with their own schedule.

Higher demand of change in MMORPGs nowadays, is because more and more games are seems to be just typical or clone to each other.  Maybe publishers and developers afraid of coming out from the “success formula” of existing game.  But we, players, demand more creativity.  Including a change for a more “lively” NPCs.  Yes, there are some challenges in implementing them: a more complicated AI so there’s a greater chance for bugs, bandwidth problem because there are so many data to be transferred, and so on.  But I can imagine that the differences are worth the challenges.  While seeing a treant walking around in an Elf area of WoW already make a better environment, I bet seeing more NPCs have social life, would add great flavour to our gaming experience.

Personally, these are some examples of features that I want to see in the future for NPCs:

Has Their Own Social Schedule

I have mentioned before, if NPCs has their own social life, it would be exciting to live a real life town rather than having a place full of talking statue.

They Spread Rumors

Imagine that quests or treasures are being rumored in a pub by some of NPCs instead of a game intructions pop up and telling you to go to certain NPC for certain quest because you just reach certain level.  Some of them might be true but need another follow up, while other is just crap.  It’s up to you to believe it or not.

They Have Preference Toward Players

In the old RPGs, we have met some NPCs that have different reactions toward different type of players.  But unfotunately, today, most of MMORPGs are not implementing this anymore.  I imagine if NPC would avoid you if you don’t have enough strength, because he prefer to talk with players with strength based character.

There are so many imaginative way of how NPCs interact and make the environment alive.  But as I say before, it will depend on the current technology and courage of developers to make a breakthrough.  So I won’t give more examples, although I have many more, I prefer to wait if someone will actually make changes.