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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...
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
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.