Politician Archive

I posted this in one of Pex's threads on the Events forum, but figured I'd repost it here, since it was something that would be really nice to give to Politicians I think.

Here's what we really need: NPCs that you can talk to!

Not only would this give the ability to make our Player Cities seem more alive, but it would allow players to create their own static long-lasting content.

This was something that was added in Ultima Online back in the day at one point, and the ways players used these to set up quests and storylines was incredible.

I'm going to get a bit long-winded here, but it'll make it easier for you so you can just copy and paste this into a design doc to send to the developers.

Here's how it works:

-A certain skill box *coughcoughPoliticiancough* gets the ability to "Hire Information Broker", or "Hire Actor" or something else cleverly named to fit the skill.

- Once invoking this command, the player gets a dialogue box with abunch of different "titles" to choose from. These include things you see typical NPCs have over their heads, like "RSF Agent" or "An Information Broker" or "A Farmer" or whatever.

- After choosing their title, the player gets a second dialogue box with a textbox. This textbox contains a randomly generated name. The player can either accept the name, or type over the textbox and give the NPC a name of their choice.

- After naming the NPC, it gets dropped in that spot. Within the city limits of course.

- Now the player gets to configure the NPC dialogue, woohoo! Sounds scary, right? Let's see if we can come up with a reasonable interface.

- Let's say we give the NPC 4 spokenmessages they can hold: A greeting, and 3 "keyword" activated messages.

- Radial Menu: "Configure Greeting". Player inputs the dialogue text. This text would be spoken like those Vendor Ad barking stuff to anybody who comes close enough.

- Radial Menu: "Configure Message 1(-4)". Now here's the tricky part, though the really powerful part. For each message, the player gets two dialogue boxes. The first to enter the keyword(d) that trigger it (maybe comma delimited? But I'd settle for just one word. ) and the second to enter the actual dialogue text that the NPC speaks when a nearby player speaks the keyword.

Now, the dynamics of this might be a bit tricky to implement. But I have some hope since there are areas in the Warren that already implement this "spoken aloud" type of dynamic. (ie, speaking the key code to disable the turret.)

And if figuring out the keyword to continue the conversation might seem a bit too challenging to the typical button-mashing SWG player, a trick we used to use in UO was to include subsequent keywords in brackets.

So the conversation would look something like this:

The player runs off to find Meteorologist Jim, and the plot thickens!

String enough of these together, and you have an epic story.

Okay, that's long enough, I'm done for now.