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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."
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.
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...
Yep, not only does GW have this feature, but in City of Heroes you can group with a friend with a new character, make them a sidekick and then he is one level below you for the duration. This solves a lot of grouping issues because the people who are online are not usually at your level. So you invite them, sidekick/lackey them, and off you go. Once you ungroup he's back to his original level. No need for robots.
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.