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Elder Scrolls More games should have NPC schedules

DraQ

Arcane
Joined
Oct 24, 2007
Messages
32,828
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Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
Oblivion schedules and NPC AI were heavily castrated during development.

You need to dig really deep to find traces of original implementation: There is a war between goblin clans which are invading and stealing totems off one another, with one guy that self-identifies as a goblin taking part in it. There were members of Mythic Dawn hiding among the population there were supposed to wreak havoc.

The problem for Bethesda was that just like in real world, those stories play on no matter if players takes a part in them or not. You may find dead Breton named Goblin Jim somewhere in the mine, and never know why and how he died.

Designers basically chickened out and remade Oblivion as paint-by-numbers action-RPG with AI and schedules acting only as a decoration.
Yeah, no, I don't care. I don't care about developers' trials and tribulations if all that's left is a shitty, distinctively low-effort looking turd of a product. Either show me a great game or a game that is flawed but has indelible mark of attempted and partially even achieved greatness.

Dead guy in a cave is not such a mark unless he is your lead artist/programmer/designer who succumbed to overwork while desperately trying to make the game a little bit less shitty. On a second thought, that's not a mark of greatness either, but at least it can elicit some genuine pity.

If you aim for the moon, but fail, that might deserve admiration. It also produces tangible artifacts.
If you aim to go out of your house flat shanty today, but trip and fall over just as you exit and piss yourself while going comatose due to being too shitfaced to even walk, that's not material for admiration. That's not even material for pity unless something has seriously broken you to leave you in this state. And if, after doing that, you claim that you did, in fact, aim for the moon, that's only material for SCORN.

What was I ranting talking about again?
 

ntonystinson

Scholar
Joined
Nov 11, 2016
Messages
181
It's a fairly tedious thing to do. Create schedules for every single unimportant NPC. What is more realistic and immersive is to create personalities for a certain class of people or "Important" NPCs/Factions something Mount and Blade did so well and hopefully improve the spread in Banmerlord
 

Metronome

Learned
Joined
Jan 2, 2020
Messages
277
This has all already been said here in one way or another but...

It's one of those things that sounds good on paper but I rarely appreciate all the effort when playing a game. I like implementations like in Harvest Moon where it's a practical consideration. You can only interact with people during certain times of the day, and that time could be used to harvest for money. So it's a meaningful choice. Not so much when you're playing Oblivion and you're just waiting for time to pass. It could also be good in a game with procedurally generated content like a roguelike, so schedules could result in unique situations for the player.

For immersion's sake alone you don't have to do it (for me) because I fill in the blanks with my imagination anyway. I know the merchant has a life and doesn't sit at the shop all day. It's just an issue of convenience for the programmer and me. In some cases the merchant acts almost more like a symbol than a unique person anyway. It's arguably as bad for immersion to have the player stand in one place for several hours waiting for that merchant to come to the shop. In real life you would go and do something else for that time, but in a game there is often little to do and no consequence for waiting around.

You see when NPCs do things, it makes me aware of when my character doesn't. Now I feel like I am roleplaying some kind of robot who can wait exactly 8 hours without moving while people live their lives and do things around him. I might even misguess how long I need to wait and the shopkeeper comes in earlier than I stop resting, so the implication is that my character just stood there for 2 or 3 hours staring at the wall before suddenly becoming lucid to buy things. Though I guess this wouldn't be such strange behavior to Oblivion NPCs at least...

Is that overthinking it? Probably, but in the same way having NPC schedules in the first place is "overthinking" things. I guess the lesson is if you are going full simulationist for the sake of immersion you have to be pretty thorough to avoid uncanny valleys like the one above. Bethesda NPCs are almost a textbook example of how half-assing this kind of thing can result in a worse situation than doing nothing. The silly NPCs and their behavior do add some charm to the games, but that seems to be unintentional. So attempting to replicate that, and expecting the same reception, would be inadvisable.
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
14,982
It seems that there's an effect kind of similar to the uncanny valley when it comes to verisimilitude. But rather than there being a sweet spot where it gets weird (although that exists too with buckets on heads and such) there's also a sort of boundary of how weird something can be no matter how abstract it gets. Something like Chess is so far removed from actual people fighting that it might as well be some sort of eldritch horror from beyond the stars. But it feels perfectly reasonable and symbolic, and swapping the pieces out with animated sprites with sound effects and gore changes nothing about it. Something like Civilization or the Paradox games gets far, far more realistic in theory but it still doesn't really feel like anything but a game. And RPGs are pretty much the same- whether I'm getting my cat to steal a sack of gems for me from an ASCII shopkeeper in Nethack or instantly and silently looting an entire shelf worth of shit behind someone's back in an elder scrolls game, it's just mechanics. Neither feels any more absurd than the other to my eyes.
 

Azdul

Magister
Joined
Nov 3, 2011
Messages
3,329
Location
Langley, Virginia
And RPGs are pretty much the same- whether I'm getting my cat to steal a sack of gems for me from an ASCII shopkeeper in Nethack or instantly and silently looting an entire shelf worth of shit behind someone's back in an elder scrolls game, it's just mechanics. Neither feels any more absurd than the other to my eyes.
Nethack is a sophisticated game, modern RPG usually follow more generic formulas.

For example, JRPGs are 8-bit games on 64-bit platforms. Some game on NES was reasonably successful, so 30 years later we get the same gameplay with prettier graphics. MMORPGs are stuck following their retarded forefathers. Remaking Fallout 1 20 years later with different scenery belongs to the same category.

Going further with shopkeeper example - Why there is shopkeeper at the entrance of dungeon ? Why the player seems to be the only customer ? Shouldn't be there other adventuring parties going into the same dungeon ? Why shopkeeper buys so many so different wares in such quantities ? Who and when supplies the shop with potions ? The answer to all those question is "we're just copying successful game formula from 30 years ago, and there was shopkeeper there".
 

thesecret1

Arcane
Joined
Jun 30, 2019
Messages
5,676
Personally, I can't say I care much for NPC schedules. I like it when there are some unimportant NPCs bumbling about so that a bustling city actually looks bustling, but I don't care too much about their exact day to day routine. Have a guy walk around the square in circles all day before going to sleep in the evening for all I care – unless he's the only guy doing that, I'm unlikely to notice since I won't really pay attention to him. With merchants and such, I like it better when they stay put to avoid the issues outlined in the posts above. Just give them some sorta excuse like "Yeah, my identical twin takes the night shift while I work during the day, so that we can stay open 24/7. We're very popular and are making a killing, so it makes sense to keep the shop going." If I can just press a button to wait 8 hours, it breaks immersion more than some halfassed excuse and provides little more than a small amount of tedium (I guess games with stealing mechanics get a pass, since there you actually have a reason to visit at night).
 

cretin

Magister
Douchebag!
Joined
Apr 20, 2019
Messages
1,347
honest question - does anyone even notice NPC schedules? Like really when you were walking around villages in skyrim did you actually get the feeling these were unique characters with realistic motivations and daily tasks? For me they were just automatons with a series of animations on loop. If development costs have to be spent on something, ill take better writing and voice acting over "the sims: middle earf" any day of the week
 

Nifft Batuff

Prophet
Joined
Nov 14, 2018
Messages
3,169
The problem arise when you realize that, in more recent games, even the dumbed down NPCs have a more complex behaviour and agendas than PCs.
 

Azdul

Magister
Joined
Nov 3, 2011
Messages
3,329
Location
Langley, Virginia
Oblivion with Oscuro's Overhaul and the Better Cities mod is the only rpg ever created worth playing, everything else is inane storyfaggotry, and everything else can't be considered a game in comparison.
What if the mole speaks the truth?
OOO by itself is not enough. FCOM is probably too much. MOO+OOO seems most popular nowadays.

As for everything else being inane storyfaggotry - there was wonderful line in Daggerfall manual - "What is the story of Daggerfall ? (...) We don't know yet.". Maybe it was not exactly accurate, but other developers are not even trying.
 

Tweed

Professional Kobold
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harsh circumstances
Pathfinder: Wrath
One of the big things about schedules in games is perspective and motive. Ultima provides you a bird's eye view of the world so it's much easier to see people coming and going to places like work and home, that applies to Ultima V to VII. With the TES games you have a first person perspective so it can be harder to notice people coming and going, especially when there's typically so few people per town. The other major difference is the fact that just about every NPC in Ultima has something to say, just being able to ask someone about their occupation instantly gives them more depth than most of the NPCs in a TES game. It's with some irony that the only TES game that lets you ask people about their occupation is Morrowind and those guys don't have schedules of any kind. Furthermore, your motive in Ultima games means you need to speak with everyone for information whether that's mantras, passwords, or just to know who's important. Your motive for speaking to people in TES is entirely different, you speak to people to get quests or complete them, that's it. The player has almost no reason to hang around to watch people unless it's directly related to a quest and no reason to talk to anyone extra when asking any loser about rumors will suffice.

Bethesda knew that, so they made sure their NPCs have nothing to say anyhow, talking is boring, you should be saving the world.
 

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