Guild Wars 2

Long story short, I think it would be nice if they updated the passive animals in the game to behave more realistically and more consistently. It’s nothing game breaking, but I think it would breathe so much more life into the world. They feel kind of weird and stiff right now in behavior.

Right now, deer are very inconsistent. In some areas, they appear white and can be killed in a single hit. In others, if you are level 5 it’s possible to get beaten by a level 10 deer. My suggestion would be to make them all passive animals, but move in herds like mobs in GW1. Have them grazing and, if players get too close, they get worried and eventually run off as a group.

In water, much of the large expanses are empty, interrupted only by occasional giant fish that don’t react at all to you. Make the fish swim away and add small schools of fish that move as a unit that hurry to get out of the player’s way.

And it would be cool if the small animals scurried to get out of the way as well.

The only thing this would negatively impact would be the passive animal slayer achievement (it would just make it take longer instead of accidentally achieving it in a month) and the few renown hearts that require the killing of rats. But what it would add is life to otherwise unbelievable creatures. With the added difficulty of bringing them down, perhaps you could gather things like red meat from deer or something, so there would be a natural node in the wild from which to attain it. (Probably not possible, and not really needed either. But could be cool.)

Anyways, there’s my two cents.

Giving the passive animals more advanced animations and scripts would cause a lot more lag probably, I much rather have a game that runs smoother…. Plus, Guild Wars 2 isn’t exactly the most realistic of games so I wouldn’t expect realism in any sense of the word.

To be honest, GW2 does a better job with it’s passive animals than in half of the other MMO’s I played where animals AND mobs just stand completely still or are animated very badly. I do agree they could be better though I just don’t find it as important as optimization.

Most of the time I don’t even notice them, they just become background ambiance and I stop noticing their rudimentary animations/behavior. This is kind of what they’re intended to be, in the background, as a part of a bigger picture, not the focus of peoples attention.

A waste of resources for a gimmick few people will notice.

It might not take that much computer resources. Red mobs already have “run toward player.” A whole map full of red mobs with this script, such as Silverwastes or a Orr, doesn’t cause lag. Adding “run away” to yellow mobs should be just the same.

As for “move toward each other,” I could see one possible problem with them forming large groups at the boundaries of their leash with another group, also at the edge of its leash, and getting stuck there, unable to move one direction because of the leash or move away because of the attraction to the large group.

Having non domesticated animals act realistically might improve game performance. In the real world wild animals often avoid humans. I expect that we could extend that avoidance to the other playable races. So we would rarely see deer and the like. When we do see them they would quickly perceive us and move away. Fewer animated “objects” on screen for our computers to handle.

I think we have too many wild animals wandering around out in the open. Most wild animals wouldn’t stand idly by waiting to be hit by an aoe so they could join the fray. If a fight started near them, they’d be outta there. Heck, they wouldn’t wait for a fight to start. Most of the time they’d be aware of us before we were aware of them and would be long gone before we got close.