What behaviors can we give to monsters to make them an interesting part of the world while the player is not fighting them? What I've seen so far: - Idling animations such as stretching, yawning, taunting, sitting down and standing up again, hopping/dancing, shaking fur/quills/etc. - Wandering randomly in a small area. This is good for monsters who spawn in a hex or on a particular screen and have to stay there, although it would also be quite interesting to make monsters able to wander throughout the whole game. - Patterned traveling: follower monsters may stick close to a boss monster, or a monster may repeatedly spawn one place, walk to another place, despawn, and repeat, or a monster may shuttle back and forth between 2 points, or patrol in a circle. - Monsters fighting each other: this can be a recurring staged battle, or a battle where NPCs join the players' side, or it could be two monsters snapping and growling at each other if they get too close but not doing any actual damage, or one monster could actually damage and kill another. Capturable monsters could be set to fight against each other without player interference similar to a cockfight. Another possibility would be placing friendly monsters throughout the game which would have a random chance of joining any nearby fight on the player's side. - Monsters can talk: animal monsters normally make all sorts of noises; sometimes animals say "meow" and "arf" in written words in the local chat channel or NPC chat channel if separate. It's also fairly common to have both pet monsters and enemy monsters make random or status-related comments from a set of canned one-liners. A monster could taunt a player it has just killed. More interestingly, pairs of monsters could be given comical dialogues, and could handle being interrupted by an attacking player with a simple Hey! or Aaa! Thought bubbles ala The Sims are another possibility. - Monsters can interact with the environment; they can eat berries off of bushes, flying monsters can land on a flower and take off again, monsters could compete with players to gather harvestable resources, or cause harvestable resources (or other monsters) to spawn. Monsters could perhaps dig holes or build mounds (which then degraded and disappeared so as not to clutter up the landscape). So what other interesting things have you seen monsters do, and what can you imagine them doing?

I hate to keep going back to it, but Trespasser had some really nifty things happen between the different dinosaurs. Different kinds of raptors would attack each other. Raptors would also attack other dinosaurs and eat them. I bet, given how the system worked the two could be combined and have one dinosaur fight off another over a dead carcass (food source).

I think having creatures doing what creatures would do if the player wasn't there would definitely add some more to a simulation. For example, sleeping, eating, finding water or food, attacking other creatures (if appropriate), tending to young, playing games among each other (keep-away, tag, racing each other, etc).

Currently, hostile mobs only have one need. That need is to kill players. They need more needs to become more lifelike.

Clothing, housing, food. If a dev could come up with a system that allows these needs to be taken care of, it would make a world of difference.

I think it would be interesting to have a player who is watching a clan of goblins. One of the gobs goes over to a sheep and begins to remove the wool. Then said gob walks over to a loom and begins to make a shirt. Afterwards, the gob puts the shirt on/takes it to a gob that needs a shirt/takes it to a shop. Now, instead of this just being a simple thing to watch with no effect on the game, what if the player decided to kill this poor gob after they harvested the wool. Instead of getting "Uber sword of pwning", the player gets "skein of wool". Same scenario, except the player waits to kill the gob after making the shirt. Now the player has a "small goblin shirt". And finally, the player kills the gob after they sell the shirt to another gob. The player will get some gold now, rather than a skein or a shirt.

Roving bands of enemies would be nice too. Not just roving on a set path, but maybe escaping an area where players attempted to genocide them.

More dynamics between races would be great, as well as between members of different factions within the same race. Wandering into an area to find a battle going on between the Yellow Spear and Blue Shield goblins would be great. Again, not set. These would be random events.

I think right now the issue for all this is processing power. In an MMO, it may be easier, due to the power of servers used to support the more modern games. For single player games, it may or may not be more difficult. It depends on how areas are set up. Take NWN for example, each little area is its own "instance". You could have dynamic things going on in that area, but only while you are in it, or you could have dynamic things going on in the entire world. Obviously the second would require a lot more processing power.

If a company can pull it off though, it would definitely be the next big step in RP gaming. Role playing isn't (only) about fighting and killing monsters, it is about experiencing the world the player has stepped in to.

Edit: Typo's

Shame on you Sun! You're supposed to be a writer!

It's not so much about interesting things, the NPC's and monsters in star wars: galaxies do plenty of interesting things, the problem with that game in particular, and every other game, is context. everyone is just standing around idling, waiting for you to kill them. Instead, you should be asking, why are they here in the first place? Once you answer that (and god forbid the answer is "waiting for the player to kill them") then you have the answer to "What should they be doing?". Are the goblins on this trail a nomadic tribe? Then the should be cutting up carcases, making huts, food, making clothes and armour and sharpening weapons. Is it a pack of buffalo? They should be grazing and moving slowly.

Just as important, they should react to the play when seen! All too often in SWG gangs of bandits and gun runners will be dancing in the hot Tatooine sun while you, a Jedi Master, stand in their face with a lightsaber ignited. only when you hit them do they react, and even then, their friends no more than 5m away continue to dance...

Actually, I'm not a big fan of realistic simulation, I don't think that giving the monsters their own needs or economy or whatever is the right idea. Monsters are props that are there to make players peel like adventurers or whatever role they have signed up for. So really we should think of monsters not as animals or natives, but like performance artists in the park hoping to get coins tossed in their hat by amused passers-by.

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Original post by sunandshadow Actually, I'm not a big fan of realistic simulation, I don't think that giving the monsters their own needs or economy or whatever is the right idea. Monsters are props that are there to make players peel like adventurers or whatever role they have signed up for. So really we should think of monsters not as animals or natives, but like performance artists in the park hoping to get coins tossed in their hat by amused passers-by.

That's fair enough. I'm a fan of more realistic simulation, though only to the point of being in conext to facilitate immersion. I misinterpreted your question as "how are we going to make monsters fit in to a world more realistically than current games do".

If you want to make a player sit up and take notice before they charge in, well, it depends on whether you want humanoid or not. Try two goblins trying to play chess, or chasing a ball around and continuously kicking it as they try to pick it up, have one drowning in some water while the others laugh from the shore, chasing but not catching chickens... Basically more than standard idle animations. Scratching their butts, headbutting a tree, in the final stages of making a pit trap, then falling in... I guess it also depends on your art resources. I have very elaborate ideas and no resources to make any of it happen :)

There're more things monster can do while idling:

- Monsters reacting to the present of the player: greeting, growling

- Monsters showing emotions: are happy about something, stomping with the feet on the ground if the failed to do something.

- Monsters starting to interact with each other: i.e. two goblins who are bored start to play some chess


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Ashaman

People always like the "i can affect the world" aspect of a game. More and more games have tried to push this forward, but it does take a lot of resources.

Idle monsters could defend territory in an interesting way. In Warhammer online there are nodes on the map where NPCs have allegiance to one of the 2 player factions. If you kill the enemy NPCs and hold the flags for a set time, the area repopulates with a band of allied NPCs. Ally NCPs would have quests, protect an area so you could complete other close by quests in peace, and provide buffs.
The game also had lots of mock battles where enemy units would fight allied NPCs. This often happened at "public quest" zones, so if you join the fight it would become a quest that escalates into a larger and larger battle.

- socialize : some monsters like company, others not so much. Loners will more likely flee from crowded places, socializer will tend to agglutinate.

- sleep. Hey, sometimes you're just lucky. Now how much skill points have been invested in stealth ?

- haul things. There are many things to be done in the dungeon. Monsters can help. They carry torches, candles, food, wine, tapestries, stones, pieces of wood, clothes, weapons, armors, cattle. No need to simulate a whole economy, but your dungeon can have a limited stock of these items that feed the loot found on monsters. If you want to go a bit deeper, have some place producing stuff and places consuming them : food goes between the kitchen and the dining room, wood goes from the exterior into the forge, enslaved virgins from the prison to the sacrificial altar...

It could even be the goal of a game to find a specific item (or prisonner) in the dungeon.

It depends what you want out of the game really.

I always liked the idea of monster ecology, in which monster live in a simplified simulation. With basic states like as follows which have an effect on the monster’s behaviour and characteristics.

Hunting/Gathering
Eating
Sleeping
Playing

Depending on the state the monster might be
- Moving around possibly in packs.
- Sniffing around for food.
- Searching bushes/tress
- Stalking prey.
- Carrion eaters waiting in the bushes for a larger predator to move away
- Mock fights
- Head butting
- Displaying
- Caring for young