Guild Wars 2

Disclaimer: this is NOT a complaint thread. It is intended to be a discussion, and perhaps offer ideas on small improvements/changes.

GW2 has very lively cities. NPC’s walk about, chatter, shop, flirt, banter, and overall act alive. Except for one small bit: players are invisible to them.
“But I can shop! And press F to talk to them!”
Yes, you can. However, they don’t really seem to see you until you hit that F key. They don’t gawk at players jumping on rooftops. They don’t get confused by players throwing fireballs in the street. They don’t step aside to avoid walking into you. They don’t distinguish between the level 2 warrior in full whites and the level 80 warrior in full exotic/ascended with a legendary. Long story short, they don’t acknowledge your existence unless you stop to talk to them.

This isn’t a problem specific to GW2; I honestly can’t really think of any games off the top of my head that make an effort to address it. Heck, some games like The World Ends With You actually justify it in-universe by making the players invisible to the general populace.

So why am I asking about it here? Because GW2 tries very hard to have a living feel, and largely succeeds. NPC’s interact with each other regularly. For example, during the short time we had access to the Labyrinthine Cliffs, that zone felt more alive than any I’ve seen in any other game. Shopkeepers routinely advertised their wares; little brats complained to their mom that they wanted two. The conversations felt genuine and living.

In Divinity’s Reach, there’s an NPC that talks to you differently based on your background. Why couldn’t this be expanded on, so that NPC’s out in the world notice players with significant accomplishments, or pay attention to choices players make? All characters have a personality score/type, what’s stopping Anet from using it?

What could be done to make the world more immersive, by making NPC’s react to players? How could the world become a little bit more alive?

I don’t know how you could handle reacting NPCs in an MMO really. With the amount of people in LA alone NPCs would end up headless if they would do as much as turn their head towards every single level 80 in full exotics.
You could script in reactions to more unlikely events, like let’s say NPCs could scream if they would see a dead player, however that might be annoying. You’re just sorting your stuff in a bank, while someone on top of it decides to have a casual event of “who can fall the closest to my corpse wins”, suddenly your ears are kitten d by multiple screams that keep on resetting.
Now to them avoiding you when you walk by – this would be abused by attempting to wall them in in a certain way. I remember when NPCs were pushable with some skills – one day the whole LA NPC population was pushed to one spot. You could not choose who to talk to.
What could be improved is when in leveling zones you run past an NPC he tells you to be careful. Make sure that he tells it only once to one person, instead of it being triggered by running past a certain place. Though sometimes it’s so fun to hear the NPC speak with multiple voices at once when all you’re doing is taking a step backwards and then forwards again and again.

This is an interesting prospect actually. Unfortunately it sounds like it would require endless hours of work playing with the NPC AI. Not that I’m against it at all.

One area they COULD theoretically start is the circumstantial NPC dialog. For example – If X player is standing at Y vista while Z NPC is passing by, said NPC will say something like “I hope that one doesn’t slip now…” or so.

granted there are much simpler, generalized ways of doing it, like just having an NPC say “you have a nice look about you” whenever a player passes a few feet from it. Like you’ve said, we’ve seen this kind of behaviour already in certain NPC’s. Even those random event NPC’s that request help for an event.

Anyway, before I go on and on about this……Yes I DO think we can get a certain degree of the immersion you’re seeking. But I think there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye.

I believe that eventually we’ll start seeing mmo’s with NPC AI closer to that of a standard open world video game, but for now it’s still a lofty dream for us.

This doesn’t happen in the cities, but in the open world, NPCs will run up to you and ask you for help when there is an event going on nearby. It would be cool to have new quests or events that NPCs direct you to.

They pray to the spirits of the wild a lot. I hear that all the time.

CreativeAnarchy.6324:

They pray to the spirits of the wild a lot. I hear that all the time.

But they rarely answer.

Too much scripting for thousands of npc’s for thousands of different variables for 8 professions for 5 races. And they’d only be acknowledging one player at a time. I don’t really play mmo’s for that, or want it in them lol. I’ll play an elder scrolls game for variable npc dialogue!

Gw1 had an npc in an out of the way outpost south east of rata sum, he calls out a random person and commented on one of their achievements, it was nifty but was also meh, he’d be cool to have near the LA bank though.

Mirta.5029:

What could be improved is when in leveling zones you run past an NPC he tells you to be careful. Make sure that he tells it only once to one person, instead of it being triggered by running past a certain place. Though sometimes it’s so fun to hear the NPC speak with multiple voices at once when all you’re doing is taking a step backwards and then forwards again and again.

There are actually a handful of NPCs that do this. Off the top of my head, there’s a peacemaker officer in the cubical building in Metrica Province (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Obscura_Incline#NPCs) that warns you about heading past him before you’re experienced enough.

Look at it this way. If you see a celebrity you go wow cool. If you see that celebrity every day you just shrug and move on.

The npcs aren’t impressed by you and don’t care.