Jamie Cannon

Let me preface this by saying that I began playing the MMO World of Warcraft a few months after it launched in 2005. I then took a break towards the end of that year, for college, and another one extending through part of 2007 until just a few weeks ago. Now that I have graduated college I found myself in a strange state of… dare I say it? Near relaxation at least, during the holiday season. I have started playing again, and I’ll admit, I’ve enjoyed it. (For anyone who wants to know: My main characters have always been Alliance, specifically a Druid, but lately I’ve deviated towards Blood Elves.)

Anyway, while rejoining the game after my lengthy hiatus I was struck by how many things had changed. Specifically, details relating to Non-Player Characters, NPCs, and more directly I mean those that are non-combatants. People who are there just to give ambiance to the scene, to provide a useful service, or who play a vital role in the progression of a quest. Throughout my time in Azeroth I have seen many an NPC, to be sure – the game world is very large and there are quite a few well-populated cities on both continents – but yet I could not tell you a single detail about any of them.

Let me step back a moment here and explain why I even noticed that the NPCs were extremely unnoticeable in the first place. Several years ago, before the 360, Wii, or PS3 graced us with their presence, I was very sick for several weeks and mostly confined to laying around the house, so of course I played video games. Lots and lots of them. Specifically I was sucked into and hopelessly addicted to The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind for the XBox. Morrowind is by no means simply an earlier version of the new Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, but that is a debate in and of itself that I will not go into here. Suffice it to say the game suffers (from a modern eye) from dated graphics and occasionally buggy gameplay, but in terms of design, story, and specifically NPCs, it is a marvel to behold. I was drawn into the world so completely that I can still describe specific quests, level layouts, and even pieces of dialog when I have not really played this game in over 3 years.

I can tell you that in Balmora you have to help an old woman get rats out of her house, and she is obsessed with pillows. There are pillows all over her basement and I believe she even gives you one as a reward for killing the rats. I can tell you there is a man standing near the water in another smaller town whose quest involves getting his pants back from a particularly strange person who has stolen them. I could go on and on at length about this game’s more finite details, but again, that would be a topic in and of itself. So for now let me use these two quests in particular for my discussion.

World of Warcraft has many great questlines in it. There is a lot of storyline progressed through dialog alone. But through the very nature of its gameplay, one might argue, the opportunity for truly unique NPCs is impossible – whereas in Morrowind, once I cleared the woman’s basement of rats, they would remain banished forever, in WoW, any mission must become immediately available to whoever runs up after you’re done. If you bring a character back from the dead, he has to go back to being dead very soon so the next person can bring him back for a nice reward.

Well, that is true. But this is not the immersion-killing topic that I mean to discuss here. What bothered me the most that day that I sat down to rejoin my friends and family on WoW was a small thing, that got me thinking. Here is a direct quote from the Patch 2.3.0 notes:

When you speak with an NPC with a single function (Banker, Flight Master, Etc) and who has no other gossip options or quests you will go straight to their functional pane rather than to the gossip pane. Most importantly this means that clicking on a flight master will bring up the flight path map directly rather than the gossip pane with the option to bring up the flight path map.

Surely this makes gameplay more convenient. If you want to get something out of the bank, well, there you go: just go up to Anonymous Elf there behind the counter and get it out. But was I the only player who actually noticed that the bankers – every one, usually 3 or more per city, and there are at least 8 cities with banks – all had their own little remarks about the bank? I remember a human woman used to tell me that no one had ever stolen anything in all the years of its establishment. It was only about two sentences of text, and below that was your option to go to your bank space. Was that interfering with anything?

This blatant deletion of what probably took several hours to create – I imagine by some kind of writer/designer intern, poor sap – was quite surprising to me. And it really got me thinking about how much time people spend noticing The World when they are playing an MMO. I have gone out of my way to observe it over these last few days and I am glad to see things such as:

Andy McBloodElf tries to get the attention of Beautiful Elflady.
Beautiful Elflady doesn’t notice Andy McBloodElf.
Andy McBloodElf sighs.

I have obviously made up the names here. But the example is quite cute I think: Some poor elf is pining away for the hot girl standing on the platform giving quests to adventurers, and she doesn’t see him. For that matter I have also seen such things as dissenters trying to rally against their government, quickly silenced via one confusion spell. And though of course the NPCs have to cycle endlessly through these events day in, and day out, in order to make it the same gameplay for everyone it makes me wonder… Of all the endless pages of dialog written in this game, for all the hundreds and hundreds of quests, and of all the millions of players enjoying a pleasant trip through Azeroth, how many people actually read any of it?

I could easily be convinced into thinking that, well, you have to read it in order to know what to do in the quest, right? Well, not so much. In fat I’m quite guilty of skimming through a pane of dialog until I see “Go west until you see X” and then just going west. And what about all those areas of dialog before the quest screen – for instance a woman complaining bitterly that her husband was lost in the disaster that’s made you and everyone else a refugee? The game would be nothing but a farce without these poignant displays of NPC-emotion. But though they would be missed if they were gone, does anyone really take note of them now?

Let me begin to tie this all up by returning briefly to my Morrowind example. One thing Morrowind (and Oblivion still) was famous for was its complex dialog options, and the way you had to build up a reputation of sorts with a person before you could get them to talk to you about private (or dangerous) matters. WoW tries to replicate this by giving reputation with factions, but again, in huge cities, where there are hundreds of NPCs, why would they all inherently trust little old you just because you saved such and such a soldier from such and such a battlefield? Well, they wouldn’t, but I can forgive them that. I would just like to see some effort put into making the NPCs a little bit more Character, because right now they are more like NPObjects, if you get what I mean.

What would it add to the scene if when you ran up to a guard and asked for directions, you were given the option of, say, insulting him? He would be offended, of course. Some may even deliberately point you in the wrong direction. What if you flirt? Would he offer to escort you through a dangerous section of town? I would love to see a detail like that in a game where most people skip the dialog entirely. Because players ignore things that don’t reward them in some way. What if when you ran through the seedy part of town and saw a beggar, you could give him a few coppers? Why not? The beggar could remain where he was, for the purpose of everyone else. But a child could run up to you in the city a few days later and thank you for being so kind to his poor papa.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that NPCs have never been handled very well even though the potential for immersion is astounding. Everyone who’s played an RPG could tell you that usually if you speak to someone two times you’ve heard what they have to say. Of course this is directly related to the amount of memory they wanted NPCs to take up in correlation to the more important details, like having enough memory to fit the entire plot on that little CD. But in the modern age of technology, adding a few interactive touches to the NPCs would not cause any major technical malfunctions. Morrowind took a risk on giving NPCs backstories and lives, and Bethesda expanded on it when they gave them monthly schedules in Oblivion (such as, on the 3rd Wednesday of the month, Rat Lady may go visit her friend in another town, and on that day she’s gone from her house and you can find her at her friend’s house). I would hope that more games are taking the same route, but any MMO who takes up the challenge has earned a round of applause in my book.