Posted By mickdude2 at 09:23 AM - Thu Jun 20 2019
Jokes on you, I plan on being useless every day, not just day 1.
Yeah, but that's more a life goal than a game goal... I mean, at least for me. ;)
Posted By Gunnlang at 08:25 AM - Sun Jun 02 2019
NPCs will really make or break this game. They have to be good enough to feed etc the kingdom. They are going to make up the bulk of the population. If they aren't good enough to keep the kingdoms going. It just become a giant empty wasteland. Gotta remember, will be 100kish NPCs at launch.
I think this is the most important call out in the thread, honestly. Given that I literally sought out Caspian and asked to work on this project, you can infer that I have a passion for a particular kind of online world experience. From that, just as a player, I can tell you that a lot of past MMOs have aimed in the same general direction, but none of them have hit the target. I would argue that not considering the state of the world when you're the first/last/only player in the game has been a major downfall of all of them.
If your world requires a robust player population to "work," then I'd say that your world doesn't work. Period. For a world to really feel alive and evolving, it needs a population that is always going about their life, and as a result always making small and often imperceptible changes to the world that together help to ensure events are always progressing and that the heart of the world is always beating. To me, and more broadly to Chronicles of Elyria, that's always meant making sure that the world's NPCs have the same sort of impact on the world that players do, whether that means advancing their crafts and providing the goods and support services the world needs or acting as guards, adventurers, scholars and explorers to ensure the world is always developing and "growing" from the perspective of the rest of its denizens.
Sure, we'd Rather that be done by players, but we can't count on that, or the moment the population dips one day, say because we all rush to go watch the latest MCU movie or something, the game world dies. Anyone who happened to see the world in that moment could decide the game is done and leave it, reducing the population and potentially setting off a cascade that becomes a self-fulling prophecy of the world's end. It has happened in many other sandbox games.
That's part of the reason you all take over NPCs when you roll your characters instead of us adding a new character into the world for you; if you had never logged in, that NPC would still be going about its business, keeping the world alive. It also helps us solve the "Wait we're all useless at day 1!" problem in that most of you will be jumping into young adults and children rather than grizzled vets or heros: the folks you replace will have been as uncertain about their future as you are, resulting if little impact to the course of events until you've got your feet under you and have decided what it is you want to do with your Elyrian Life.
Hope that that helps! :)