Creating immersive NPCs: Piranha Bytes vs CD Projekt RED vs Bethesda Softworks

I absolutely love the world design and dungeon crawls in Nehrim and Enderal, but yeah, the lore is often a bit too... eh.

 

Depends on the game you are trying to make.

The scale in both Gothic and Witcher require different apporach to NPCs. That's why you are undecided because both do excellent job at delivering a believeable world experience.

Beth can go fuck themselves, they create shanty towns full of clowns or mindless robots. I wanted to make a statement that they would remove NPCs altogether if given chance but Fallout 76 happened.

That's why I voted communism.

 

But we are not talking about lore here but immersive NPCs, where the city of Ark and the Undercity to an extend actually feels alive, even with the generic NPCs, most of them have a place to live, work and they go around to the church or to the tavern at night to eat or dance.

They took what i liked of Gothic and mixed it up with TES, also NPCs that literally freeze you out of the blue to lore dump you are at most like 3 or 4 in the whole game, the other NPCs with quest you must talk to them first and they even have a (Knowledge) tag to indicate you that you are about to be deepthroated with lore.

 

The poll options confuse me. When I think of immersive (oh, how I have come to despise this word!) NPCs, what comes to mind are:

• Ultima VI
• Ultima VII
• VtM:B

None of which are even in the poll. When I think about what makes these charachters so believable and immersive (even though the VtM:B ones don't even have as much as a schedule), they obviously fall into the "unique NPCs, sparsely populated" category, and stand out by virtue of their writing. Which is not surprising, a well-written paragraph of text can convey much more of the atmosphere of a place than dozens of Witcher-3-style bots.

But any poll that lumps those three together with Skyrim must be deeply flawed (admittedly, as Oblivion turned me off Bethesda for good, I've never played Skyrim, but I doubt that the NPC design philosophy is so much different from Morrowind or Oblivion, so I'm judging by those past experiences).

 

As much as i iove the Gothic series, i will probably give the award of the most immersive and living world to RDR 2, although respawning npcs did spoil the illusion somewhat.

All the other games are far behind these two

 

OP is leaving out the fact that NPCs in Gothic react if you draw your weapon in a camp/town.

 

Something so simple, yet so effective.
I still don't understand why RPGs nowadays don't do the same thing, when a game released almost two decades ago managed to do it.

 

This is because Bethesda could have easily made NPCs react to you drawing a weapon, had they wanted to. It really wasn't a compromise they had to made between these different approaches, but a compromise they had to made between their game and their audience.

 

This particular topic was on my mind recently and it was actually the reason I gave up on Atom RPG fairly close to the start.

The game had a lot of NPCs that had nothing interesting to say and yet the game forced you to interact with ALL of them.
(otherwise, how would you know who the important ones are). It made the game feel like such a chore compared to
Fallout 1.

Take the "villagers" at the first settlement for instance. All of them had the same thing to say in different permutations:
"I work hard etc bla bla bla". Who the fuck cares?

 

Gothic, but only because it's a small-ish world and you don't have to run around looking for a specific NPC. Actually the more that I think about it, the more I prefer garden variety NPCs over these "hello-fellow-humans" things you describe. It's amazing too look at for 15min and then becomes annoying for the other 50 hours. Or maybe it just depends to what you're used to, for me immersion is more about avoiding breaking the illusion than making it more realistic.

 

What makes you say so?

 

I'll just clarify, the categories are:

Gothic
+ Major NPC's are always done very well.
+ NPC's conversations are aligned with what you are seeing, environment, all that
+ NPC's seem to have different personalities (some are liars, some most are pricks, etc)
+/- NPC's can cut you off and never speak to you again in the same conversation
- Conversation doesn't seem to reflect your rank, more along the binary path of if a score > x, you can talk to village leader for next quest
- Conversations aren't exactly conversations but more of statements made at you, with (usually) generic responses. There are exceptions.

Skyrim
+ The best voice acting, like Oblivion, is reserved for angry guards
- Pretty sure the Major NPC's had the same voice as everyone else in the game. I could be wrong, but at least Oblivion had Patrick Stewart as the King and Little Wayne as Martin
- NPC's are the same bodies with different clothes and slightly different things to say
+/- The best part of conversation ("the Personality wheel") from Oblivion was dropped from Skyrim. Maybe programmatically too demanding/too expensive to implement so I'll cut them some slack.
- Monotone, boring, not a lot of voices. I honestly can't remember a single conversation in game
- Conversations aren't exactly conversations but more of statements made at you, with (usually) generic responses. No exceptions.

W3
+ Excellent voice's for NPC's, or at least I didn't get bored of them
+ The voice work seemed to be in line with the status of the person you are speaking to - lots of variation between peasant and royalty.
+ For the most part, I liked the NPC's. A lot of conversations appeared to be a real conversation, warts and all.
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There are no towns or cities, hamlets at best.