Frequently Asked Forum Questions
Search the HBO News Archives Any All Exact		Search the Halo Updates DBs Halo Halo2		Bungie Webcam HBO XBL Gamertags *Ar's Simple HTML Guide Shishka's Guide for Newcomers The Lowdown on Download Accelerators Red Loser's Anti-Spamming Guide Egg FAQ | More Egg Stuff c0ld's Movie Starter Guide Shishka's HaloPC Pre-Release FAQ 3.1 AutoMagic 117 StripzMaker
Search Older Posts on This Forum: Posts on Current Forum | Archived Posts

NPC Design Critique (or, Kat vs. Alyx Vance!)
Posted By: General Battuta <seth.dickinson@gmail.com>	Date: 10/24/10 12:41 p.m.
Let's figure out what's going on with the NPC design in Reach, and why it feels a little rusty. First off, let me fumble for a definition of good NPC design, looking at games that I intuitively feel did it well. The NPC character should not cause the game to fail when she dies (KEEEEEYEEEES!). She should not be able to die in a persistent manner at all, unless the story demands it. This means some form of invincibility for the NPC. But said NPC should not do the player's work for them. Conversely, they should not be useless to the point of inviting mockery or frustration. Clearly there's a narrow tightrope to be walked here. Furthermore! The NPC should be able to meaningfully interact with the player in a way that is both useful to the gameplay and which builds an emotional connection to the character. It's best if each individual NPC has a unique way of contributing. Hallmarks of good NPC design in recent years include Alyx Vance, who was endearing and helpful and who provided the basis for a number of great cooperative gameplay sequences; Prince of Persia's Elika, who made the game darn easy but felt like an indispensable companion; and Republic Commando's squadmates, who were smart, easy to manage, and indispensable without doing all your work for you. How does Reach stack up? There's plenty of good here. The NPCs are competent, rarely do your work for you, and can - in some circumstances - make a significant contribution to the battle. They don't cause failures upon death; in fact they don't die at all. Which leads to the bad stuff. They're invincible. They complain about taking damage, make remarks about being stuck by grenades, reel under hilariously insane amounts of gunfire - but just kinda stagger off while asking for some help. Every time you see this it's inevitably going to damage immersion. How could it have been done better? Republic Commando's system was awesome - teammates can be downed, other teammates will attempt to revive them (Gears this isn't). This turned teammates into a gameplay resource, giving the player interesting decisions between fighting and helping teammates. If done poorly, though, it can turn teammates into irritating paperweights constantly begging for revival. This is perhaps why Halo 3 sort of used this, except without the revival mechanic. The problem here is that letting your Spartans be 'downed' every battle makes it ridiculous when they finally die for good. Why, the player would ask, can't I just revive them again? Give another shot of biofoam, another zap from the defib gun? It's also a blow against the general Halo ethos of keeping things simple and uncluttered. This, I think, is probably the most powerful reason why they made Noble completely invincible. I think it was the wrong call. I think we could've gotten some amazing, endearing gameplay moments out of a vulnerable Noble Team. A few mechanical suggestions - 1. Overwhelmed teammates caught out of cover are shot to their knees and crawl for help, expressing pain in character-appropriate ways but still fighting, rolling onto their backs to shoot. The player can help drag them into cover - imagine hauling titanic Jorge behind a rock while he fired his chaingun to cover you. Could've been a blast. 2. Give each teammate an armor ability they can use in place of 'dying' or being knocked unconscious. Overwhelmed teammates could drop into an usually prolonged armor lock, camo and slip away, sprint away and wait a couple seconds before returning, or drop a hologram and peace. It'd make them seem smarter, too! That's how I'd handle Noble team 'death' in Reach better. I'm going to hit up two more primary problems with Noble that make them underwhelming: dialogue and interactivity. Their dialogue is repetitive and draws from a fairly small pool. On the one hand, I appreciate that there are disc space concerns; on the other hand, Valve managed to get Alyx onto a 360 disk, and she has an enormous amount of situation-specific dialogue. Having just a few lines for each situation is forgivable. The real problem with Noble is that they don't have many situations they actually respond to. We get lines of congratulation for a kill, complaints about incoming damage, and not much else. We needed to hear more to believe that these were real, deep characters. Suggestions! 1) Reactions to friendly casualties. Accompanying animations. Kat bending to check a Marine's pulse. Jorge, doing the same, muttering a benediction. 2) Reactions to specific player actions the character would be interested in. Emile would have specific dialogue for player melee kills. Jun would have more elaborate commentary on sniping than 'Center mass!' over and over again - compliments for headshots, jokes about sloppiness if you took a whole clip to kill an Elite. Specific dialogue for use of specific vehicles. Dialogue for the player beating Covenant corpses - 'Calm down, Six.' Dialogue for the player being in really bad shape, context specific too: 'Watch that fuel rod grunt!', etcetera. This may seem incredibly demanding, but other games have managed it and I think it would have been a worthy use of resources. PAUSE HERE! If you're about to say 'man, this is a great wishlist, but you have to understand game development - they can't do everything.' I believe it, absolutely, I understand the nature of crunch and resource allocation. But! Republic Command did all this. It had this stuff! Anyway. 3) More flavor dialogue for noncombat situations. Back and forth with Marines. 'What's it like being a Spartan?' 'Busy. Secret.' So on. Last up. The biggest problem, in my eyes. Noble is an underwhelming design element because they are not used to create interesting gameplay. They're invincible marines, except you can't swap guns with them, and they have armor abilities, and they are bad drivers like the Marines. That's it. Remember shepherding your herd of Marines back through Gravemind in Halo 2? Trying to get them to the end of the level? Taking pride in how you'd turned them into a squad of Carbine and FRG-toting badasses? That's creating interesting gameplay with NPCs. It makes sense that you can't give weapons to Noble members. They're defined by what they use. Nor would squad commands be appropriate, nor the kind of co-op 'buddy lifts you up a cliff' design seen in, say, Splinter Cell. But there has to be SOMETHING that could've been done to make Noble more than a set of invincible NPCs and walking plot points. Something that allowed us to get to love them because they helped us, not just because they were with us. I'm going to throw out a bunch of suggestions here. These are not necessarily good ideas, but they are the kind of interactivity Noble needed. Jun's mission was about sniping. We could have been allowed to spot for him, or vice versa. Jun could have scouted the area with active camo and tagged targets a la BC2; or we could have done this for him. This builds a partnership. Jorge is huge, tough, and protective. He's a tank. Do like we saw Kat doing in a trailer: use him as mobile cover in a hostile environment. Heck, get wild and use some technobabble to pool Noble 6's shield with Jorge's; make your lives literally tied to each other. Emile is insular, hostile and brutal. Work against this by making him perform close protection for Noble 6 while she does something important. A SWAT-style scenario in which 6 and Emile clear rooms together - something that does more with his abilities than 'Pillar of Autumn', which makes him look ineffective. He can earn the player's trust and affection through performance, and vice versa. Kat is about information control. Let the player show her things. Let her tell things to the player. Put her in a Falcon overhead; have her give the player careful descriptions of each upcoming encounter. Carter is...okay I got nothin'. My point here is that it's possible to build the characters _through gameplay actions_, through interactivity, through the nature of the video game medium, rather than through cinematics. Who among us wouldn't have been delighted to have a Noble teammate treat our wounds during a lull in battle? That kind of actions builds a social bond, even if one end of the bond is artificial. NPCs these days are growing. They should act as if they know the player exists, and everything they do that involves the player draws the player deeper into the game. Context dialogue, meaningful interactive gameplay elements - these are the foundations of Halo's NPC philosophy, a way to make them seem like real actors in a simulated world. Noble didn't quite make it. There was too much contrived behavior (invincible NPCs asking for help?), too little interactivity (no equivalent to weapon switch), and too little dialogue. More to come as I think of it. Did that make any kind of sense?

Message Index

NPC Design Critique (or, Kat vs. Alyx Vance!)	General Battuta	10/24/10 12:41 p.m.
Re: NPC Design Critique (or, Kat vs. Alyx Vance!)	Cody Miller	10/24/10 12:44 p.m.
Re: NPC Design Critique (or, Kat vs. Alyx Vance!)	General Battuta	10/24/10 12:46 p.m.
Re: NPC Design Critique (or, Kat vs. Alyx Vance!)	Leviathan	10/24/10 1:48 p.m.
Re: NPC Design Critique (or, Kat vs. Alyx Vance!)	Jillybean	10/24/10 4:05 p.m.
Re: NPC Design Critique (or, Kat vs. Alyx Vance!)	Cody Miller	10/24/10 4:13 p.m.
Re: NPC Design Critique (or, Kat vs. Alyx Vance!)	General Battuta	10/24/10 4:13 p.m.
Re: NPC Design Critique (or, Kat vs. Alyx Vance!)	Cody Miller	10/24/10 4:19 p.m.
Re: NPC Design Critique (or, Kat vs. Alyx Vance!)	Grunt Hammer	10/24/10 3:32 p.m.
Re: NPC Design Critique (or, Kat vs. Alyx Vance!)	scarab	10/25/10 1:19 p.m.
Re: NPC Design Critique (or, Kat vs. Alyx Vance!)	scarab	10/25/10 1:29 p.m.
...Why isn't this at HRINC?	DHalo	10/24/10 1:07 p.m.
Re: ...Why isn't this at HRINC?	General Battuta	10/24/10 1:39 p.m.
Re: ...Why isn't this at HRINC?	GrimBrother One	10/24/10 2:17 p.m.
Ah never mind.	DHalo	10/24/10 1:10 p.m.
Re: NPC Design Critique (or, Kat vs. Alyx Vance!)	SonofMacPhisto	10/24/10 1:36 p.m.
Re: NPC Design Critique (or, Kat vs. Alyx Vance!)	General Battuta	10/24/10 1:40 p.m.
Re: NPC Design Critique (or, Kat vs. Alyx Vance!)	Leviathan	10/24/10 2:13 p.m.
Re: NPC Design Critique (or, Kat vs. Alyx Vance!)	SonofMacPhisto	10/24/10 2:26 p.m.
Addendum	SonofMacPhisto	10/24/10 2:28 p.m.
Re: Addendum	Leviathan	10/24/10 2:44 p.m.
Re: Addendum	SonofMacPhisto	10/24/10 3:18 p.m.
Game Exchange Program	Leviathan	10/24/10 3:33 p.m.
Re: Game Exchange Program	SonofMacPhisto	10/24/10 4:49 p.m.
I support this.	IccaRa	10/24/10 4:13 p.m.
Emile + Romeo = Bunk	Jillybean	10/24/10 4:46 p.m.
Re: Emile + Romeo = Bunk	SonofMacPhisto	10/24/10 4:52 p.m.
Re: Emile + Romeo = Bunk	Jillybean	10/24/10 5:31 p.m.
Re: Emile + Romeo = Bunk	Bry	10/24/10 7:31 p.m.
Re: Emile + Romeo = Bunk	SonofMacPhisto	10/24/10 8:23 p.m.
Re: Emile + Romeo = Bunk	The Loot	10/24/10 8:43 p.m.
Re: Emile + Romeo = Bunk	Bry	10/24/10 8:51 p.m.
Re: I support this.	Beckx	10/24/10 7:43 p.m.
Re: I support this.	SonofMacPhisto	10/24/10 8:24 p.m.
Re: I support this.	Beckx	10/24/10 8:41 p.m.
Re: Addendum	Leviathan	10/24/10 3:30 p.m.
Re: Addendum	SonofMacPhisto	10/24/10 4:51 p.m.
NPC Dialogue	uberfoop	10/24/10 2:40 p.m.
Re: NPC Dialogue	Moorpheusl9	10/24/10 3:23 p.m.
Re: NPC Dialogue	General Battuta	10/24/10 3:27 p.m.
Re: NPC Dialogue	Moorpheusl9	10/24/10 3:30 p.m.
Re: NPC Design Critique (or, Kat vs. Alyx Vance!)	TCKaos	10/24/10 5:30 p.m.
Re: NPC Design Critique (or, Kat vs. Alyx Vance!)	Kermit	10/24/10 5:32 p.m.
Re: dialogue is repetitive	kornman00	10/24/10 5:47 p.m.
I think my big problem	General Battuta	10/24/10 5:55 p.m.