COMMUNITY - FORUMS - SOULBORN ENGINE
NPC - The boundaries of conversation and storytelling

Hey guys,

does someone know just how we are going to be able to communicate with NPCs? This game seems to be all about story. Of course there are a lot of stories that are gonna be told by all the different Players and driven by this awesome engine.

BUT! A lot of stories are gonna need some assistance from NPCs.

I heard that the NPCs are supposed to be very intelligent. We are gonna be able to take control over NPCs when creting a new character and even look back onto the life they were living. It should even be difficult to distinguish NPCs and PCs at first glance. But how is this going to happen? How will they be communicating with us? The developers of this game seem to have a solution for about everything that went wrong the past couple of years in this genre. Did they tell us something about this issue before what i just missed?

I would be greatly disappointed getting into game at last and being confronted with some ready-made sentences to choose from when talking to a NPC.


Have a great day, Year, CENTURY! Nimeruun on the way. Check out my Channel if you want. I'm gonna be streaming CoE as soon as I get the chance! https://www.twitch.tv/nimeruun

5/16/2017 5:40:10 PM #1

It will be text base kind of like fallout just to give an example. It will be ready-made sentence, I don't think we are going to any game within the next 5 years that have AI smart enough to accept free form text and hold a conversation.

NPCS will be intelligent to the point where they will have their own personality on the way they respond to you..Some may be happy to help, some may tell you to go away, etc...This will all be within the parameters SBS set for their responses though.

5/16/2017 6:01:05 PM #2

I expect this is how we will interact with OPC's, too. I'm curious whether we will be able to write conversation trees for our OPC's to use.


Shieldwall Strong!

5/16/2017 6:11:01 PM #3

Posted By CommonlyQuixotic at 2:01 PM - Tue May 16 2017

I expect this is how we will interact with OPC's, too. I'm curious whether we will be able to write conversation trees for our OPC's to use.

I think at the most we will be able to add what they will reply after a player makes a selection..

Like if you have a store set up and a player selects "Buy", the npcs replies "What are ya buyin'" think brings up the interfact. That's just a guess though.

5/16/2017 9:23:29 PM #4

I'm sure it will be pre-set text. The interesting part is which preset text the NPCs have and why.

eg. if a merchant asks me to bring him the head of a bandit chief because that merchant has been attacked on the road three times in the last week and he lost two of his guards, that's cool. If that's just the text every merchant offers, not so cool.