NPC Play

[Nervous Pete]

I was thinking about the nature of NPC's in The Long Dark today, and how to get them to work in Sandbox whilst binding them to the themes of loneliness, empathy, decision making and threat. I have here a couple of ideas that I hope you might find intriguing and they range from the moderately difficult to implement to down-right 'My God, we probably need to wait for a sequel to this,' kind of thinking. This isn't exactly a wish-list, I love The Long Dark lots as is and the purity of your creative vision is one I very much admire - but I feel as an eventual optional sandbox extra it could really add something a long way down the road...

Idea One:

Spawn-able NPCs. 

Okay, so you wake up, leave the shelter and head on down the road, taking a track through the wood. There you find a man sat next to a camp fire. He appears unarmed and has a backpack by him. He looks up at you and shifts uneasily on the tree stump he's sitting on. You can't tell what the outcome of this encounter is going to be, but maybe there'll be subtle clues. Meanwhile, the AI of the character has been spawned with a random personality, random inventory and a possible complication to the encounter...

Possible AI character reactions: NEGATIVE

Paranoid / Armed

"Keep away! I'll use it, by God!" (If you advance, he starts shooting, mainly missing...)

Paranoid / Unarmed

"NO! NO!" (Flees into wood.)

Hostile Overt / Armed

"You made a big mistake." (Starts shooting, forcing you to flee, duck for cover, return fire.) 

Hostile Sly / Knife

"Come sit by me and warm yourself by the campfire, son."

Possible AI character reactions: POSITIVE

Friendly / Items

"It's good to see you. Began to figure I was the only one. You lacking for anything, friend?"

Friendly / Medic

"Looks like you've been through the wars. Here, maybe this'll help."

Friendly / Hints

"I come from a ways up the track, been walking can't think how long now. Saw a birch sapling on my way down, by a tree like an arch at the foot of a cleft. From the looks of your bow, you might need it."

Friendly / Stories / Music

"I haven't played to no-one but myself and my dog in how long. Care for some music?" (Period of cabin fever invulnerability / improvement through future spirit mechanic.)

Possible AI character reactions: IN DISTRESS

"Please, I think it's my leg." (Give medicine, gain slightly improvement in spirit.) 

"You got anything to eat, mister? Please, it hurts." (Give food, see above.) 

Refuse and the character in distress might break down and cry, causing a loss of spirit for yourself, or weakly attack you forcing you to kill them, and creating a far greater loss of spirit. (Depression)

Further complications however could make this a whole lot less clear-cut. If you're armed and the hostile man is doing okay for himself might be grudgingly accepting, not wishing to provoke a gun / knife fight. Likewise if you're weak and have nothing worth stealing, he might just greet you with cynical laughter. A friendly type seeing your in need might be expansive, but if they're low on supplies they might slowly get more and more suspicious the longer you're around them. And so on.

Going even further, there could be an additional danger in they're not being alone. Imagine chatting happily, whilst all the while their companion who was hidden in the rocks sneaks up on you. Maybe you should have clocked that second set of footprints, or the way the guy kept looking over your shoulder. Maybe there was something that seemed forced about the girls tears. Maybe you should have checked your pockets after indulging in that bro-hug. 

These encounters would be rare, and would spawn in various settings around the map at a random pre-set date. You could go a whole game and not encounter one. But when you do, it's all down to a mix of your condition and intent working against their personality and their needs. Naturally, you could view them as just another potential frozen corpse to loot, and that's depressingly valid too, but that could easily have negative consequences of its own. I'd be equally happy however if the majority of encounters had no game-mechanic / item perk and was just a memorable moment of companionship, or perhaps sadly fear. 

Upon death, each character would drop a journal by the way. A neat idea would be a crowd-sourced real-life player journal from another region, completely another real-life player's vetted journal words up to the last few pages where the in-game random character enters your valley as a preface to your encounter.

Upon peaceful resolution of the encounter they explain that they're moving on, and next time you pass on through they'll be gone. 

It would be a big implementation, obviously, and I've no idea how you'd do it, or even if you could. But it's just an idea. Maybe you even have something similar planned, or cooler! 

 

IDEA TWO:

Spawn-able NPC Territory Play:

My God, this is ridiculously epic and completely unworkable, but what if...?

Imagine if an AI character, or small AI team, spawn in a sandbox game with a percentage likelihood dictated by player. (I think it important that they could never really bank on it happening. The thing I love most about Long Dark is how every story is different, and flows from your own decisions and chance encounters.) The difference is that this team can within limits move, and have a plan for settling in the valley also. So, you set on up the path from the Mystery Lake cabin to the Trapper's Cabin. But despite a clear run the last how many times, this time you find a man and woman already there. She has a gun too. You approach warily. It's decision time...

Again, random personalities and mutual condition and wealth dictate to a degree your interaction, but not as extreme as the smaller encounters. They're intent on making a home there and now you have to decide how you're going to deal with this...

Player options:

 "This valley isn't big enough for the both of us. I barely get by on my own." 

You can persuade the other team to move on. You may have to sweeten the deal with supplies. This works if they're in a bad condition, poorly armed or not at all, and if they have low morale. Of course, it could lead to an escalating argument, paranoia and violence.

"I was here first. But if you need a place to stay..."

Relocate the team to another setting. Lakeside cabins or the lookout tower. A conversation branch might give you clues in steering them to another place that they'd find acceptable. Or visual clues, such as if they're in the Trapper's Lodge but have fishing rods. 

"Okay, I guess you can stay. But let's get things settle first. There's such things as boundaries..."

Here's a big mechanic. You can cede a place to the other player. (They let you grab the stuff you left there, perhaps even gratefully offer to help you schlep it back.) If the place your ceding has an important item such as a workbench you can arrange to use it in exchange for the odd supply. A condition of ceding however means that you cannot hunt or gather resources within a distance of their cabin. If you do, each time you go there you get an increasingly frosty reception - until outright hostility is inevitable. 

This completely changes the game, and an uneasy co-existence develops. However, who knows...? The mutual need to fend off wolves, survive in a harsh environment and indeed the basic need for company means a friendship eventually strikes up. The stronger this develops, the more mild liberties can be taken by both sides. (No insane Fallout 4 "YOU STOLE MY SPOON YOU DIE!" reactions as you miss-click here, please.) In time, things could even get a Little House in the Prairie. (The original manuscript with all the death and disease, natch, not the sanitised published version.)  

Then one day you could return and find them dead outside of course, killed by a bear. And by God, you'd be choked up at work for days and wouldn't be able to explain to anybody why. 

Say you wandered into a new valley and someone had already spawned there.You'd be on the receiving end of your decision options above, at the mercy of the AI. Also, because the character models and names and AI randomise, you could never tell who was going to wind up what. And in the end, driven by desperation and mounting hunger as you realise you can't really hack it with the diminished resources in your valley owing to your less-than-frugal play-style, perhaps you decide to murder them all. Making you feel miserable and reclusive in real life for the next few weeks. DECISIONS!

So yes, an insanely complex implementation probably and maybe just a fantasy. But I feel I'd really love a game that generates story out of well-written character interaction that is from a genuine confluence of environment, situation, character and player choice. It'd feel real. The AI characters wouldn't even have to be seen hunting and could largely be static (though it'd be awesome if you did) or resource gathering. There'd just be greatly diminished spawn rates in their area for wildlife and resources. Though it would be sweet if you could invite them round for dinner too. The most important thing to get right I think is not to succumb to the depressing murder-machine that Day-Z and the like evokes, and for there always to be hope. Although encounters can turn horrible, in this increasingly grim-dark media orientated world I still feel the best stories are ones of people struggling to support each other, not tear each other to pieces. Probably why I love Willy Vlautin's music and writing so much, and why David Lynch's 'The Straight Story' hits hard for me every time. 

 

All this came out of daydreaming on the bus after my first 25 hours of play with this magnificent game, and from reading Earth Abides and John Christopher's wonderful and under-rated bleak apocalyptic novel 'Death of Grass' (named 'No Blade of Grass' in America, so not to appear a nightmare apocalypse solely for stoners.) This is a novel which is a must read for the Hinterlands crew in my opinion as its full of those difficult moral choices. It's a 1960's Brit sci-fi book but it doesn't pull its punches, and if you dig Day of the Triffids you'll definitely find Christopher an even more thrilling, brutal cousin to John Wyndham. In brief, it's set in a world where wheat-fields and pastures and even scrub has rotted away, leading to a family fighting their way to their brother's hidden farm, where they hope they'll be safe behind a stockade in a valley with a plentiful supply of potatoes and fishing. The values of civilisation fall away in a matter of days, and a man considering himself of respectable middle class stock finds himself rapidly becoming something akin to a feudal lord with some horrific decisions to make to in order to protect his expanding 'tribe'. Great stuff. 

Anyway, phew, fair play if you read that long winded rambling. Thanks again for a wonderful game and again, please just take this as potential inspiration, not something I'm hammering at your door for you to do. Love and distress-rockets!

Pete

 

[Dirmagnos]

Interesting. With exception of all that depression crap.

[HedwigTheGreat]

woah. That sounds amazing.

[Salty Crackers]

This sounds pretty good, but these encounters should be very rare. A big part of the experience of the game for me is that you're alone. Personally, I don't really want NPCs in Sandbox that much.

[Nervous Pete]

3 hours ago, Dirmagnos said:

 

17 minutes ago, Salty Crackers said:

This sounds pretty good, but these encounters should be very rare. A big part of the experience of the game for me is that you're alone. Personally, I don't really want NPCs in Sandbox that much.

Yup, I wouldn't want it all the time either. Hence the optional setting in Sandbox, allowing you to choose the possibility before you play. Even then I'd want it quite rare, to be something that feels like a very special occurrence. Although how thrilled programmers would feel labouring extensively over something gamers only see say 10% of the time, I'm not entirely sure. 

 

3 hours ago, Dirmagnos said:

Interesting. With exception of all that depression crap.

New rule! You can collect pogs from dead bodies to improve your spirit and counteract the depression! 

Remember anti-depressants? They're back! In pog form! 

[Dirmagnos]

Why, why its always morale or depression or garbage like that ? Personally, for me, it would completely ruin the game, taking away whole "man vs dark" feel, forcing me into some idiotic boundaries that have no connection to reality to begin with.

[Nervous Pete]

11 hours ago, Dirmagnos said:

Why, why its always morale or depression or garbage like that ? Personally, for me, it would completely ruin the game, taking away whole "man vs dark" feel, forcing me into some idiotic boundaries that have no connection to reality to begin with.

Hmm, got a point. Yet I feel its something handled in great novels of the post apocalypse that is never touched upon in games, and it's a shame. I wonder then if it could be reflected in ambience instead of game mechanics? Upon waking a snippet of despairing dialogue. Colour grading gets a little more sombre and colourless. Then as time passes and things begin to work out again, dialogue becomes more optimistic, etc.

I don't know, any mechanic I feel would need a light touch, but just enough to represent your feeling something at the presence of death, and not, "Wahey! He's got a granola bar!" 

But please believe me when I say that I hate being forced into things too. Yet I feel elements of morale might, done wisely, eventually be a fun and interesting mechanic if gentry done. This isn't regular survival after all, it's a sometimes bleak new world. Hope you find it something to ponder on, anyway.

 

 

[Dirmagnos]

Thing about novels is that you mainly ride a shotgun, not experience them in "first person" as in game. So id like to be able to associate with person im playing with, eg him is me.

While i accept the fact that it may have a place in Story mode, since were playing as preset protagonists, with their own, already developed view on the world and have to adapt to it, then in sandbox you are, well, you.

Plus, i havent see a single game(and ive been an avid gamer for 20 years, give or take), where actual effects of end-of-the-world scenario would be applied, to any degree, on features like morality. We either play some generic stuff, with static basic values, as good is good(like D&D), or we get enforced rules based on a point of view of person who havent even been real hungry and is adamant that even if things will go to hell hes be all noble and just and shit like that. Something that absolutely never happens in real world.

[Nervous Pete]

Hmm. I'd certainly argue as I did in my original post for the setting to be optional, so it didn't impose on players. 

I guess then perhaps the best thing if NPC play did come into being is for a negative encounter to not have 'depression' mechanics but in and of itself to be so well done as to provoke an emotional response in the player themselves, and that in its way will affect their future play. Therefore a player committing a murder would not find it an easy thing to do at all. It would be difficult to get right in a game however, as it could wind up just being too bleak, or rather creepy in the sense of power it gives a player. 

Certainly not a game-play option you'd rush to program, or one that I could see being in sandbox within the next year or so. But again, I thought it was an interesting idea.

By the way, Dirmagnos, please please please read John Christopher's wonderful, 'No Blade of Grass / Death of Grass'. It's basically about a 'decent, normal' person who's never been really hungry in a world gone to hell shocking himself at the lengths he'll go to in protecting his family and getting something to eat. 

 

[Dirmagnos]

2 hours ago, Nervous Pete said:

Hmm. I'd certainly argue as I did in my original post for the setting to be optional, so it didn't impose on players. 

 

*facepalms himself*

2 hours ago, Nervous Pete said:

I guess then perhaps the best thing if NPC play did come into being is for a negative encounter to not have 'depression' mechanics but in and of itself to be so well done as to provoke an emotional response in the player themselves, and that in its way will affect their future play. Therefore a player committing a murder would not find it an easy thing to do at all. It would be difficult to get right in a game however, as it could wind up just being too bleak, or rather creepy in the sense of power it gives a player. 

Certainly not a game-play option you'd rush to program, or one that I could see being in sandbox within the next year or so. But again, I thought it was an interesting idea.

By the way, Dirmagnos, please please please read John Christopher's wonderful, 'No Blade of Grass / Death of Grass'. It's basically about a 'decent, normal' person who's never been really hungry in a world gone to hell shocking himself at the lengths he'll go to in protecting his family and getting something to eat. 

 

I love that idea, without any numbers or bars or crap like that. In addition to that it would be atmospheric if each action could have an effect, like protagonist making comments regarding various stuff, and depending on how he goes thru the world, hes comments would get darker or brighter, sarcastic or cheerful, etc

Also, serious events, like murder or finding death body wouldnt be just a walk-bys, that you get used 2 fairly fast and just treat corpses like just another container. No, it could play out similarly to bear encounter, a short scripted pause, where player stops and makes a comment or just silence. Would happen only once, or, under certain conditions, could have a different scene. Stuff like that. Of course it would be nice if world would be more dynamic, with corpses/containers disappearing or reappearing under certain conditions, like blizzard burying them or uncovering, strong winds bringing random stuff for player to find if he stumbles on it in his travels, or wild animals dragging things around. One can hope.

Gonna take a look at that book, thx for reference.

[Fuarian]

It would just be really awkward whilist walking down the railroad and seeing someone walking towards you but in the distance. Like what do you do yell at him? Wave? It seems like it doesn't fit TLD but it HAS to be implemented to make this game "good". (By that I mean how the devs want it)

[knightjoke]

maybe get inspiration from telltale games with the npc

[Sandra]

Personally, I like being alone in the Sandbox. (Although I think Nervous Pete's ideas are very good.)

But I would like to see NPC in the Challenge Mode. For example, finding an injured/sick person in the snow. You then would have to take him/her to safety and keep him/her alive for a certain amount of days. Or you have to reach another goal but need to gain another person's trust to achieve it (maybe the NPC knows a safe kombination or hides a key).