OPCs: A Concept Discussion
Posted: 11 May 2017, 15:51
I've been mulling over a concept that gets me quite excited, so I wanted to get some thoughts and suggestions on the matter. The idea is OPCs: Offline Player Characters.
The challenge of a game like Path is that players are visible while offline, in a persistent world where you could die whilst on the toilet. I have plans on making that fairer for the offline player, while also more fun for the online attackers, by way of offline AI battle tactics, where the offline person skirmishes back, dodges around, uses powers, supports nearby allies being attacked, or runs depending on their set personality / tactics.
But that's not really the aspect of OPCs that I wanted to discuss today. Offline AI is something that will happen, and OPCs is a sort of separate concept, so one could happen without necessarily including the other.
Having said that, OPCs work in a similar way; you (optionally) set the personality of your character, and they go about their business as if they were online, even going as far as to respond to online players by talking to them. I'll break the idea down for you:
Current Task
You'd set your character to perform a certain task while offline. Something simple, such as gathering a certain kind of item, fighting NPCs in a specific area, guarding a building from all intruders, performing routine hacks to find source codes, etc, and they'd go about doing this while your energy levels are exceeding maximum (for a max of 24 hours after your last log in). Of course, the EXP gained from this would be minimal in comparison to actual online levelling and grinding, but the idea here is that it makes the world feel more alive, as you'd see offline players going about their business. One concept I have here is having your character stand by as a shopkeeper, selling marked items from their inventory at a low, medium, or high rate. Of course, lots more thought would have to go into this system in order to make it fair, especially considering catch up boosts and training equipment is already a thing.
Offline Roleplaying
This is where it gets interesting. You could optionally set your character to respond to other characters, depending on if they are on your allies list, enemies list, or neither. So let's say somebody walks past you in a pub, and they click on your name which brings up your character sheet, the first page of the character sheet would be your offline interactions page. So in this example, you click on an offline player character, who speaks to you as a neutral person by--for example--complaining about the weather. It could be as simple as that, where the offline dialogue is just one page of flavour text to set the tone of your character's personality, or it could be something more interactive that you could set up for your character. For example, the offline character could complain about the weather, and then the online person could be presented with 4 response dialogue options, each of which lead further into your offline character's dialogue tree. You could write all of this to be as complex or simple as you like, even perhaps going as far as to make your offline characters join forces with the online person and follow them around as backup (just an idea).
When you log back on, you'd get a summary of the interactions you received with online players. Naturally, this probably wouldn't suit hardcore roleplayed characters, but it's something that could be fun for characters who aren't roleplayed very often, as it'd just give online people something extra to play with. Newbies especially would find it a fun element, akin to talking to townsfolk in old school RPGs.
OPC Quests
Now let's say you set your offline personality to chat to other people. We could take that a step further, and your character could ask neutrals or allies to perform a task for them. So you could set the task as being locating an individual, selling you a certain rare ritual ingredient, or attacking somebody, for example. The online person goes off and does the thing, then returns to your character for the reward. Hey-presto, we have a functioning player-content quest system.
Retiring PCs to NPCs
Picture a character you're bored of playing. Maybe grinding them has become a chore. Maybe you don't have the energy to roleplay them anymore. Retire them from PCs to permanent NPCs. With this, they'd act out their OPC personality and tactics forever, adding to the flavour of the world for online players. If defeated, they'd vanish from their regular spot / task for a period of perhaps 2 weeks, and then return to it when they have healed.
Of course, all of these options would be optional. And this is just an idea in progress; it quite possibly will never happen, but I wanted to see what people think of the idea.
The challenge of a game like Path is that players are visible while offline, in a persistent world where you could die whilst on the toilet. I have plans on making that fairer for the offline player, while also more fun for the online attackers, by way of offline AI battle tactics, where the offline person skirmishes back, dodges around, uses powers, supports nearby allies being attacked, or runs depending on their set personality / tactics.
But that's not really the aspect of OPCs that I wanted to discuss today. Offline AI is something that will happen, and OPCs is a sort of separate concept, so one could happen without necessarily including the other.
Having said that, OPCs work in a similar way; you (optionally) set the personality of your character, and they go about their business as if they were online, even going as far as to respond to online players by talking to them. I'll break the idea down for you:
Current Task
You'd set your character to perform a certain task while offline. Something simple, such as gathering a certain kind of item, fighting NPCs in a specific area, guarding a building from all intruders, performing routine hacks to find source codes, etc, and they'd go about doing this while your energy levels are exceeding maximum (for a max of 24 hours after your last log in). Of course, the EXP gained from this would be minimal in comparison to actual online levelling and grinding, but the idea here is that it makes the world feel more alive, as you'd see offline players going about their business. One concept I have here is having your character stand by as a shopkeeper, selling marked items from their inventory at a low, medium, or high rate. Of course, lots more thought would have to go into this system in order to make it fair, especially considering catch up boosts and training equipment is already a thing.
Offline Roleplaying
This is where it gets interesting. You could optionally set your character to respond to other characters, depending on if they are on your allies list, enemies list, or neither. So let's say somebody walks past you in a pub, and they click on your name which brings up your character sheet, the first page of the character sheet would be your offline interactions page. So in this example, you click on an offline player character, who speaks to you as a neutral person by--for example--complaining about the weather. It could be as simple as that, where the offline dialogue is just one page of flavour text to set the tone of your character's personality, or it could be something more interactive that you could set up for your character. For example, the offline character could complain about the weather, and then the online person could be presented with 4 response dialogue options, each of which lead further into your offline character's dialogue tree. You could write all of this to be as complex or simple as you like, even perhaps going as far as to make your offline characters join forces with the online person and follow them around as backup (just an idea).
When you log back on, you'd get a summary of the interactions you received with online players. Naturally, this probably wouldn't suit hardcore roleplayed characters, but it's something that could be fun for characters who aren't roleplayed very often, as it'd just give online people something extra to play with. Newbies especially would find it a fun element, akin to talking to townsfolk in old school RPGs.
OPC Quests
Now let's say you set your offline personality to chat to other people. We could take that a step further, and your character could ask neutrals or allies to perform a task for them. So you could set the task as being locating an individual, selling you a certain rare ritual ingredient, or attacking somebody, for example. The online person goes off and does the thing, then returns to your character for the reward. Hey-presto, we have a functioning player-content quest system.
Retiring PCs to NPCs
Picture a character you're bored of playing. Maybe grinding them has become a chore. Maybe you don't have the energy to roleplay them anymore. Retire them from PCs to permanent NPCs. With this, they'd act out their OPC personality and tactics forever, adding to the flavour of the world for online players. If defeated, they'd vanish from their regular spot / task for a period of perhaps 2 weeks, and then return to it when they have healed.
Of course, all of these options would be optional. And this is just an idea in progress; it quite possibly will never happen, but I wanted to see what people think of the idea.
