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NPC Hirelings Coming To D&D Online
This weekend's GenCon saw Turbine release some new information about the upcoming Module 8 release for Dungeons and Dragons Online. Massively has a story with many of the new changes, which are focused on making the game more accessible to new and solo players. A big part of that will be the introduction of NPC hirelings, which will supplement individuals or smaller groups who want to play without waiting for a full party of player characters. Reader nicholsonb points out more coverage at Destructoid.
"... you're able to hire an NPC character that's your level or below, and they come in Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, kind of a variety. Sorceror as well. ...So they take a place on your HUD. You can heal them, they can heal you. You can help them. They'll break boxes, they'll kill monsters without any instructions from you. But they won't zerg through the dungeon, they won't open gates. You can ask them, 'yeah, go ahead and open that gate, dude,' but you're able to control all their behavior, so they're working for you. And of course they cost money, right? So they actually are working for you in the fiction of the game."
NPC Hirelings? Or is this a new PC class option for those who want to earn some money as they play?
In Diablo 2 you could at least hire one (perhaps 2 my memory is hazy).
It made the earlier-middle parts in GuildWars soloable. It's something more mmos should have.
If you pay more money, you should be able to hire more hirelings.
Having done work in both AI and game physics, I have the suspicion that the first true AI entity will be an NPC. There's ongoing demand for smarter NPCs, they have a world with which they can interact, they're physical within that world, not abstract intelligences, and they compete. That's the space in which we can make progress.
Laugh now, but someday we'll be in charge - an NPC.
I just finished a 10 day free trial, and I have to agree. By level 3 it was too hard/slow to solo, but too sparse to find a decent group. You might say "10 days isn't enough to judge by" but why would I pay to play in the slight hopes that I would find a lively player community on day 11?
We are all just people.
And now that you can enhance your party with hired npc's you shouldn't despair yet. For now the next development is almost done: making these npc's play fully on their own! And the next development to that will be the fully automated D&D RPG game!
I'm not sure why the parent is modded down. I've played DDO for about a 1/2 year and I have to agree that the game has quiet a few problems that really dont keep players interested for very long.
The focus on grouping I think is one of the major problems of the game. Its pretty impossible to do anything without a group. Solo adventurers have shitty XP and even shittier loot. While its understandable to make some instances for groups only, by a large amount the content sucks for solo.
My second problem is the setting. I'm just not crazy about the world of "Eberon". I dont know why they cant use Forgotten Realms (like Zhentil Keep, or Shadow Dale, even Water Deep would have been nice). The "Punk Fantasy" look is pretty shitty IMHO and is certainly not the D&D that 80% of us old bastards started with and want to participate in today. Its sad too, because a large segment of DDO population are older people.
The logical layout of the landscape is also problematic. While having a majority of content confined to certain "areas" there is no feeling of connectedness between any part of the game world (exception of the Dockside and the Bazzare). Even the attached "houses" seem pretty out of place. I know people from WoW and EQ tend to complain about the "filler" space that connects "useful" regions, but DDO is a MMO without "filler" space and it just feels absolutely wrong... with no other way to explain it.
These problems are not immediately noticable and you can sink a lot of time into the game before these problems become an annoyance. After the graphics wear off and your left with just the game play, waiting for groups, popping in and out of "safe bubbles" and completing quests without having to really go anywhere becomes really boring.
I highly doubt that adding an NPC is going to really improve anything. Because we all know for every + feature there are two more more - tweaks to accompany it.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
In the expansion only, Lord of Destruction.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Saw the headline, and my first thought is, "They're hiring people to play every NPC? Awesome!"
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Others have pointed out that Guild Wars has had henchmen for hire from the start, but that idea gained an even more striking boost in the 3rd GW campaign, Nightfall --- Heroes.
In the original two campaigns (Profecies, and Factions), you had a choice of one or two henchmen (both male and female) per profession in the game, which at that time had 8 different professions (now 10). Most professions offered only one henchman for hire per town, but the important professions of monk (healer/protection) and warrier provided two henchmen in most places. So, for example, in a town with a maximum teamsize of 8 members which can be either live players or henchmen, you might build a team with 7 henchmen of various kinds plus yourself, or 7 real people plus a henchman to fill the empty slot, or any other combination.
However, those original henchmen had a fixed skill set and a standard AI behaviour which you could not alter, and you could not control their positions either. They simply followed the human team players around, and fought whatever you fought.
When Nightfall came out, the original henchmen remained available, but to them were added customizable Heroes which you earned by completion of special storyline quests. When you complete such a quest, the corresponding Hero is "unlocked", which means that it is available to you in every town or campaign in the game, forever more, and the level of customization is extremely impressive. (Each human player can add up to 3 Heroes to a team, and the mix of players, Heroes and henchmen can be anything you like.)
Not only can you set up the weapons and shields of each of each of your own Heroes, but you can also set up two properties on each of their 5 pieces of armor (insignias and runes, on each of head/chest/arms/legs/feet). Furthermore, while each Hero has a fixed primary profession, you can change the secondary profession of each one at will, and spread the Hero's available attribute points across any of the Hero's skill attributes. Typically you do this just before heading into a fight zone or dungeon, so that your Heroes are most effectively configured for the battle ahead.
In addition to the above, you can configure up each Hero's skills bar with 8 active skills (the same as human players get), chosen from among any of the skills that any of the characters on your account have acquired, in other words thousands of skills once you've played the game for a while. The combination of skill attribute points allocation and set of skills on the skills bar is called a build in GW parlance, and you can can configure such a build in just a couple of seconds, simply by loading a skill template that you stored away earlier, or which another player has given you.
And, the icing on the cake: each Hero recruited has a "control flag" button on the window decoration surrounding the mini-map/radar of its owner, and with a click of that button you can make the corresponding hero go to any spot on the map or terrain and remain there until the control button is unclicked. There is also a general team control flag which any henchmen in your team will obey, and this is also obeyed by your Heroes unless overridden by their individual flags.
Finally, the UI allows the behavioural AI of heroes to be varied a bit as well, by giving them individual attack targets, and also by setting their fight mode to Fight, Guard, or Avoid Combat. And, for the most part, they will each use their 8 chosen skills quite intelligently, often better than players. :-)
This level of customization and control is very powerful, and the balance between control and complexity is quite good. It sounds complex at first, but it takes only a few hours to become quite expert at using the control interface at high speed during the mayhem of battle. And, since the skills deployed by Heroes are ordinary player skills, the competence you acquire with skills on your own characters i
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
D&D Online was fun for me for a while, but their house rules for D&D sucked so bad that the endgame was unplayable for me. My first character, a halfling 4 fighter/6 ranger specialized in bows, was great fun up until I got to the end game stuff, when I figured out that without fighter "action point" powers to boost my hit, I could never do any kind of damage to most of the endgame mobs, who all had rediculously high armor class that was basically unhittable. That and the insane saving throws of the dark elves in that big end-game raid thing (not the dragon, the big mountain) which made my wizard equally worthless. The golem player race was pointless, stupid, and a chore to heal... ug, the whole thing was a clusterfuck. Why they ever chose Ebberon over Forgotten Realms I'll never understand. I'm sure some douche in marketing thought it would have a "broader appeal" or some crap, and he was probably the guy who convinced the developers of Star Trek: Elite Force 2 to turn their game into a Soldier of Fortune with a star trek skin. I don't know what is with all the fail in some of these franchises. At least Neverwinter Nights was fun, sadly NWN 2 sucked balls (or at least, it did when it came out, and I couldn't even drag myself past the first hour or so of gameplay, especially when the goddamn first NPC you have to rescue would just kind of wander off on his own, stop following, or whatever).
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
I did the 10-day trial thing (December 2006) and found it a bit different with respect to grouping.
Leveling up was painful, in the extreme. Unlocking the inner city (market place?) was painful and required groups to get through the waterworks, etc.
I had gained entry to a guild by the end of the trial and had some friends to play with when I found I had made an uber noobish mistake. I was playing on a European server in the US. It took some days of phone calls (after I had bought a full account) to discover that I had lost all that effort.
When I tried going through the same steps on a US server, it was just too tedious and I gave up pretty quickly.
At the same time, I got World of Warcraft - it had none of the same difficulties. And, since WoW plays on computers I *like* to use, as versus being something MIcrosoft Windows only, I've kept playing it.
Besides being solo friendly (and increasingly so in the year and a half I have played it), it is family friendly in that one can keep playing even with severely restricted family/job time commitments.
I love these sort of RPG games and have been playing them on computer for almost 30 years. It's a pity that D & D Online was done so poorly. The graphics were very cool, but the gameplay sucked, big time.
They created it in Eberron because they were told to, my guess. It was right around the time the setting was released, and Wizards was pushing it.
Consider a group of character-level 15s coming across your everyday 18CR demon. A level 15 wizard tossing around chain lightning and a level 15 fighter getting 6 attacks will wipe the floor with the demon.
A 7/8 fighter/wizard in this group will be doing less than half the damage per round, tossing around low powered (5d6?) fireballs, trying (poorly) to beat the demon's spell resistance, or making 3 piss-damage melee attacks per around, whilst trying to beat the demon's damage reduction.
Your best bet in any original-rules 3.5ed D&D game is single class, or, at the very most, take 1-2 levels of some class whose abilities scale well with character level. Unless you are a munchiken.
Minions of Mirth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minions_of_Mirth) went another route, though somewhat similar to Heroes. There aren't henchmen or heroes in the game. Whenever you log on, you select from your list of characters who comprises your party. In otherwords, if you have 3 different characters that you play, you can group them together and control them all as a party (like the old single-player RPGs where you build your party up).
To think, I started out to mod this thread. But....
Wizards of the Coast has been trying to half kill the Forgotten realms for years now.
Such a shame too.
~DF
This is a great idea, and one I hope to see them port to other MMOs as well. Even WOW with 11 million subscribers suffers that sometimes, some places you just cannot find a person online that wants to run a particular dungeon playing a particular role/class that you need. The fact that this can prevent you from advancing in the game is one of the most frustrating aspects of an MMORPG.
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
I always kept the archer from the first land. The only really useful one, imo.
As I usually played Sorceress I found the A2 mercs with their auras more helpful. In one of the very recent expansions they added many polearm runewords (a2 mercs use polearms) that give auras, including one with an easy to acquire very very handy mana regen aura.
The biggest problem was that it was very difficult keeping one alive when fighting bosses because Blizzard set it up so that they take something like 4x the damage from bosses. As a sorceress I can keep it alive by constantly teleporting it away and healing it. Having the option to change their AI to one that is more defensive (like the A1 merc) for bosses and then switching back to aggressive for normal fighting would be a godsend.
On a sorceress usually my merc goes down first, but if I see my merc go down that means "Get the heck outta here!!!".
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
That would be awesome. With as much money as they're making in most MMOs, why not?
Similar to the ARK program in Anarchy Online, you could train advanced players to run NPCs also. You can reward them with in-game perks worth a pittance.
The difficult part would be to give them enough leeway in the things they can say and quests they can give to keep both them and the players interesting. The nice thing is that a player run quest character could inspect the party that is asking for the quest and give them a quest tailored for their party, i.e. right difficulty given their armor, rewards that they can get based on their class, etc. What they do to unlock the quest can be interesting too. A player run quest giving character could give out quests as whimsical as "Get four other players to feel pity on you and give you one credit" to as serious as "Given your excellent service in holding up your side of the battle in the war against the other side, I've decided to reward you with a quest for ..."
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Yeah, considering it is their best setting, I don't know wtf their problem is. Maybe they're still having to pay royalties on it or something.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
It's hard to see Dungeons & Dragons Online as a going concern, at least in its present form. If nothing else, the lack of responses to this topic illustrates how far removed it is from the typical Shashdotter's radar.
Wizards has abandoned the 3.X rules which comprise the core of DDO. All new material being published by Wizards is for the new 4.0 rules and -- consequently -- third-party publishers are likewise focusing on materials for the new version.
Also, while the Eberron setting is still supported, it's not the "core" world. In fact, the new core setting is about as removed from Eberron as you can get. Whereas Eberron is a world of long-established kingdoms and empires, the new setting (does it even have a name?) is described as being numerous petty kingdoms separated by gulfs of uncharted (and extremely hazardous) wilderness.
What would not surprise me is a sequel to DDO using the 4th edition rules, either in addition to DDO or as a successor to it. 4th Edition already plays a great deal like a MMO converted to PNP form: classes are simplified, have MMO-style roles and have neatly-defined progression trees. Making a MMO based on the new rules would be substantially simpler than what they've already accomplished and (presumably) they could reuse a huge quantity of existing assets, depending on how flexible the core game engine is and whether Turbine/Atari can swing the 4th edition license.
This is an interesting move by Turbine - I think it says that they do believe in DDO, and still want to attract new players to it. The early game stuff is definitely frustrating when you don't know how to group (it takes about 3 weeks to get the hang of grouping, IMO).
How about the fact that FR is licensed out to someone else already so there is no way that Turbine could have gotten a hold of FR.
Second, who holds ALL of the rights? Hasbro/WotC. Who determines who will be allowed to do what? Hasbro/WotC.
WotC wanted to push Eberron big a few years back so that is what they licensed out. Talk about people still bitching about really old things and never thinking before opening their mouth.