Ekim's Gamer View: The NPC Predicament
Ekim, 2003-07-25

Why are there so many NPCs in MMORPGs? I found myself asking myself this over the last weekend. NPCs have a variety of uses in a game. They help advance the plot, they provide some level of interaction with the player, they sometimes even become friends in some particularly nicely scripted stories. But notice that most of these functions are story-related, something that most (if not all) MMORPGs actually lack, or provide very poorly. So why are there even NPCs in MMORPGs?

Zombies in the city

It might be a trivial question, but it suddenly hit me. In most MMORPGs, NPCs are mainly used as vendors, static characters that you seek out to sell your loot and buy things from. Some NPCs will provide quests which will send you to other NPCs or a variety of places. Usually those quests are pretty bland, and lifeless, static. You rarely even have to actually read the text they provide as a dialogue. The use of NPCs in multiplayer games has always been questionable, for me anyways. How can you truly expect to create a player-run economy while NPC vendors are arbitrarily dictating prices?…

In some games (like DAoC for instance) NPC vendors are used to give a basic market value for some items, while also providing the materials that crafters need to create the things they want to. I think SWG (and even AC2 before that, to a lesser degree) made crafting extremely elegant by making the player his own resource of material in most cases, and the need to buy materials is minimal. What's even better is that if ever the crafters need materials that they cannot get on their own, they will most likely be bought off another player, not some static NPC in the middle of a city somewhere.

But SWG still has NPCs, it just did away with them as vendors… Actually they didn't do so completely since merchant players can actually hire an NPC to sell their stuff for them, something I actually approve of regarding the use of NPCs. So, even though there are virtually no NPC vendors in SWG's major cities, you still often find yourself swimming in a sea of them, all grouped up in a corner, seemingly talking to themselves. What purpose do they really serve? Right now they are simply quest nodes. Their purpose in life is to stand there and greet you when clicked on. Sometimes they'll provide a quest. Modern zombies of a harmless kind. Nothing new at all…

An NPC's function is never done

AC2 provided a virtually NPC-less environment at first, and yet I can't say that it was better than having too many of them. I guess a happy medium must be achieved somewhere. Or perhaps the function of NPCs should be completely revised as far as MMORPGs go. I would have hoped by now that players could create quests themselves, but it's still a dream that's up for grabs. It would then really render NPCs pretty useless in MMORPGs. So, in preparation for the day when players becomes the true masters of their online worlds, what use could NPCs serve other than be static quest nodes or processing power junkies?

It's a hard question to answer I guess. But my only thought seems to be to make them more alive, without making them really more interactive. We've been arguing for years that static NPCs are boring and don't help the immersion factor. Morrowind was highly criticized for not having NPC schedules. Ultima 7 is till highly praised for having just that, which made its world come alive in a way that not many other games have achieved thereafter. Why not bring this to MMORPGs? Let's see less NPCs in cities, have them only tell me that I'm bothering them when clicked on, but give them a life of their own. Have them go from building to building, following an agenda. Have them go home at night, please! Make the city come alive even when no players are around!

Interactivity in MMORPGs should come directly from other players, not NPCs. But they do provide some grounding to the world in which we are dropped. They are supposed to be the inhabitants of a world I am visiting. Like when I visit a new city in the real world. I don't necessarily talk to this flora of life that inhabits these cities, I just want to see them breathe and go about their business. Make it at least seem as if the virtual world I am visiting has something happening in it besides the random killings in the surrounding wild.

Less is more or less more… or something like that…?

Quest nodes could be trees for all we care. Actually, the NPCs in most MMORPGs right now are pretty much as interactive as a tree would be if you could click on it. Only the NPC turns to face you when you click it, while a tree would remain motionless. And lets make one thing clear while we're at it: NPCs are not to be considered static content in an MMORPG. They are content filler, at best.

Now, I know that programming NPCs to have agendas demand some level of work. But I figure that since this is work that is usually needed on a single player game, which MMORPG developers are ordinarily excused from, they should now lift up their sleeves and get to work on it a little. Hire just one more guy to do just that if you have to, I think the players deserve it. And as prices of MMORPGs continue to rise, I also think that the developers could afford it as well. MMORPGs are not a new genre anymore, so lets start doing new things with old ideas.