I feel Earthbound, the classic SNES RPG where Ness debuted, is a masterclass on NPC dialogue. The dialogue is so well crafted it makes you eager to talk to each NPC you come by, knowing even if they don't give you relevant information they will give you a silly hot take on the world they occupy. It makes everything so much more rich. The Rabbit Girl referenced in the article is from Undertale by Toby Fox, who cut his teeth in gamemaking creating Earthbound mods. I suspect this is why his characters in Undertale follow a similar whimsical nature to this early influence of his. Undertale borrowed a lot from Earthbound's character construction.<p>I've been playing through Earthbound over the last few weeks and consistently find the writers and localization team put in just the right extra 10% to turn a "bleh" interaction into one you think about for days to come. For example, in a nod to the greedy, one character grumbles about the loan he gave to your family and now he "lives in poverty" - all while standing in the biggest house in the game.<p>Later on, a key item with key information gets shipped to your character via the equivalent of Fedex "Neglected Class." A rumpled delivery man eventually shows up and tells you "Anyway, he said... well... uh... I forgot. Yep, I forgot... actually I forgot the stuff I was supposed to deliver, too. I think it was some weird machine to make trout-flavored yogurt. Yeah, I forgot it at the desert... I'm not going back that way, so don't ask me to get the package... I mean, it's your package, right? So YOU go get it! Go on, get out of here." You then have to schlep to another part of the game to recover the package the delivery man decided just wasn't worth his time [0]<p>If you've played the game and want to figure out why some of the quirkiness just WORKS, I would recommend the later parts of Tim Roger's piece from a decade or so ago [1].<p>[0] <a href="https://youtu.be/EIoLcNLyd0g?t=27902" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/EIoLcNLyd0g?t=27902</a><p>[1] <a href="http://archive.is/fMD7F" rel="nofollow">http://archive.is/fMD7F</a> (edit - huh, yeah this article has NOT aged well at all I should have taken a closer look since it first was released long ago, but I'll leave it here for the sake of discussion & derivative comments).
A really good reference for things like this is D&D's Dungeon Master's Guide. It collects a whole lot of advice about different parts of creating a world and story. It doesn't go deep, but it's a great reference.
It seems like the author is conflating natural dialogue with creativity. You can't give a character much personality in a few lines of text, so Mother-style quirky dialogue (as in the Undertale example) is one way to make your NPCs more memorable despite that constraint, but they definitely won't sound like real people or have much character. "An animal walks another animal on a leash" is a joke, not a character.<p>The author shows how to turn a short hint into a more fleshed out character interaction, but "personality" is limited to a trait ("brave", "klutzy") or a relationship to the player, and in an effort to convey these traits in just a couple of lines of text, they end up coming off as forced, contrived. Definitely an improvement from the walking hint, but trying to convey a personality in too few lines and having it come off as a caricature, in my opinion, is worse than an underdeveloped character.
I think another thing that could help make it feel more immersive would be a bit of unreliability or incompleteness in information gathered from NPCs. Why does every villager know that there is a legendary mirror in the Fire Mountains that can block dragon flames? Were they all at the meeting where that was clearly and repeatedly announced? Maybe instead they could be saying things like "I hear theres some legendary weapon in the Fire Mountains". "Mabel told me she heard about a a magic mirror that drives away dragons". "An adventurer came from the mountains the other day and mentioned a magical shield against dragons". Now the player knows they should hunt for something to fight the dragon, but what it is isn't clear. Perhaps the full info will come from an important NPC later.
Matthew Mercer (the dungeon master of Critical Role) gave this useful tip about NPCs during a Q&A after an early episode of the first campaign : the two most important things to know about your NPC is 1/ what they want and 2/ what they fear ; after that, you can improvise.<p>Of course, in a video game, NPCs won't improvise, but I guess it's a useful advice to tie NPCs in their environment and not just have them being some sort of isolated entities.<p>That being said, as both a d&d player and a RPG videogames players, what I would really want from NPCs in videogames would be for them to stop being just "switches", which I activate using an action button and who provide always the same text. The videogame which allows discussion with NPCs to be initiated by a question asked by the player will get all my attention :)
Cool read thanks for sharing. Probably just bias but my experience with some games man the NPCs really make the game tick. Two quick examples, hollow knight, dark souls (or all soulsborne-kiro). Both are big on exploration etc. NPC interactions are so memorable. Will never forget certain times playing, making progress, finding crazy ass new hilarious NPC.<p>Fromsoft has plenty of these memorable NPCs from demon souls to sekiro!
I’m playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance at the moment. It’s one of the best open world experiences I’ve played thanks largely to the NPCs and their stories/requirements. A smaller world, by modern open world standards, which allows devs to create a more meaningful world. Hell, I’ve spent a third of my time playing Farkle (dice) with various NPCs, simply enjoying the pub background chatter etc.
Aw, I was hoping for some approach to making NPCs more conversational.<p>I've been trying to use Rasa for that. Rasa is really intended for Siri/Alexa like things, or rather, it aspires to be. In practice it can do a phone tree with a few digressions. It's based on TensorFlow. You put in a list of questions users might ask, and when someone does ask, it detects which stored question is closest. So you can put in a FAQ, and people can get answers based on it.<p>There's a notion of "slots", so someone can ask "How do I get to PLACE", that would match "Where is PLACE" (that's the TensorFlow part) and the matcher returns PLACE, which can be looked up. I'm not sure this is much ahead of Bobrow's BASEBALL program from the 1960s.
Man, this is great. I have a project oriented to give NPC's a more human touch. The project is on a early stage, (just a prof of concept, really), but with a dialog generator, I think I can make a NPC behave's like a player in the game.<p>It's kinda hard cause programming games is not my real job. I work at a bank and the hours are long, but I still wanna finish this project someday and test with on a RPG.<p><a href="https://github.com/victorqribeiro/gaia" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/victorqribeiro/gaia</a><p>The proof of concept I was talking about. By the way, I'm open to discuss this project with anyone interested.
Memorable NPCs definitely make or break games, or having NPCs at all (looking at you Fallout 76!). One of the most recent great experiences has been with Hollow Knight; I got so immersed in trying to figure out more about these interesting creatures and their stories, even though they barely really had much to say in some cases. I think something that helped a lot was also how different they all were from one another.<p>On the other hand, a game like Zelda BOTW, I really wanted to get more into the characters, and the cut-scenes were they used voices were incredibly capturing, but then most of their dialogue then ended up just being text, even for the primary characters, which really hurt a bit at the start. The game is still one of the best ever, just wish there was more voiced dialogue.
I cannot believe that it was a monetary thing, so maybe just space conservation?<p>Hopefully <a href="https://replicastudios.com/" rel="nofollow">https://replicastudios.com/</a> will be able to help make NPCs more like characters.
With the latest Unreal Engine demo out, I can't help but think that we've probably had enough polygons for a while. Maybe we could have a few iterations of game engines with really revolutionary procedural generation, and ultra realistic text-to-speech.
Better themes in games would go a long way to make more interesting NPC.<p>If you have a stereotypical theme, your NPC's may have a hard time not being stereotypical too.<p><a href="https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/gsg-content/uploads/2018/10/roguelike_theme_list.png" rel="nofollow">https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/gsg-content/uploads/2018/...</a>
Hey all - I'm Max, one of the co-editors of The Pause Button, a publication all about video games.<p>I wanted to share one of our recent contributor posts that I thought you'd all enjoy. If you have any recommendations for good gaming content to check out, are interested in writing for our publication, or just want to chat - feel free to commment here or email me at max@pausebutton.news
I always dreamed of building a MUD, which lives on two completely independent servers and features the same world. But players from one server would appear as NPCs (in-character descriptions would be mandatory) on the other and vice versa. That way the NPC dialogue and gameplay that would emerge on any one server would feel magical to PCs.
It doesn't have to be much. I still vividly recall my discovery of what happened when you repeatedly clicked on the same soldier in Warcraft: Orcs & Humans[1].<p>[1]: <a href="https://youtu.be/qPN-x7rST58?t=15" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/qPN-x7rST58?t=15</a>.
I go the complete opposite direction in my game. The NPCs convey as little information as possible and nothing that is not relevant to the gameplay.<p>This makes them completely braindead and not immersive at all but for me it's all about the gameplay and mechanics, not superfluous NPC dialogues.
Just want to plug Cross-Code here.<p>I didn't make it, and don't know the people who did. But I loved it for very relevant reasons to this article.<p><a href="http://www.cross-code.com/en/home" rel="nofollow">http://www.cross-code.com/en/home</a>