I have been loving this game for over 450 hours now, but now that I am nearing the end of the game’s content things are starting to become stale… I believe a lot of this (for me personally) is a lack of long term immersion with the NPCs in the game. here are my concepts for improving how “alive” the exiled lands feel
night
night time is one of the foundations of any survival game; it provides new players with a fear of whats out there and when combined with atmospheric music it serves well in CE. the devs should expand on this and have NPCs react to this with changes in behavior and aggression range to simulate nocturnal creatures and the vision impairments of a human in the dark… also… why don’t wild NPCs carry torches?
NPC factions (black hand, darfari, ect)
The human NPCs that we take for thralls is the foundation of most of the systems in game… they make production and fighting easier and are a requirement of any level off success ingame…. but why are the unbroken NPCs forgotten? i’d like to see a full fledged interactive system with the NPC factions; a players actions should impact their stance towards the player. give us the ability to earn our way into (certain) factions… and perhaps even add actual captives that can be rescued (or enslaved from) other NPC factions to change your stance with these factions affected. the game Empyrion Galactic Survival manages a (simplistic) version of this that makes a player’s interactions matter with the NPCs. please consider this as it would make the exiled lands feel more alive!
thanks for the read… sorry for the wall of text… had to put down my ideas
Well, the torch thing is understandable when you think about it. in most cases, when you have a campfire or the like, it blinds you in the darkness. Sure you can see in the area that is lit. But it also has the effect of making the dark even darker, so you cannot see beyond that range of light.
The same can be said about a torch. If you hold it wrong, it blinds you so while you can see in the immediate area of it, you can’t see anything period farther out.
If you tried to hold it behind you so you didn’t ruin your nightvision, you are back-lit and a perfect target for others.
You’d be surprised at how well you can see in the dark, with as little as a half moon out. So long as you don’t ruin your vision by looking into a fire. You can’t pick out minute details, that much is true. But you can see things.
The NPC factions thing, I think that’d require a rather robust system to be put into place. You’d have to tag every single member of the faction as being within that faction. And then add a variable onto the player character, one for each faction, to govern the amount of rep within.
It’d have to keep track that if you attack a member of the faction, the rep goes down.
But there would have to be special cases where we have already neutral factions that don’t bother us unless we are fighting to capture a thrall near them, such as in Sepermeru.
thanks for the support (or at least a comment…) I will admit that I have next to no knowledge on the extent of a human’s nighttime vision…
and as for the NPC system… it would require a robust system… but they already have the NPC coding made I believe…. with the NPCs reacting to others being attacked nearby and rushing to defend themselves… they also sort of have a faction system ingame to some extent with the ability of NPCs to recognize and attack animal/monster NPCs… i’d also be curious to see if different NPC factions would fight in the same way… I believe I recall seeing the darfari and the Blackhand fighting when they meet… not sure though