Nothing breaks immersion like an NPC that spends the days/weeks/months that the game covers standing in the same doorway, reciting the same line. It doesn't matter if the Demon Lord is fixing to sacrifice all of the town's goats in some evil scheme, if the sun has been replaced by a bleeding eyeball or if zombies roam the streets in the next town over. This guy is clearly a veteran RPG NPC: he's seen it all and he knows it ends better for him if he just pretends not to notice.

Unfortunately, this isn't an easy problem to fix. To provide a good player experience, certain people need to be reliably found at any time. If you're out of potions and the shopkeeper is on the lam, what will become of the goats? It can also be frustrating to have a juicy quest reward waiting if you could just track down the NPC in question.

My initial efforts to mitigate this problem included deciding on a tight scope in terms of land traveled and being sure to have just about every NPC involved in at least one main/sidequest per chapter. Also, as events reshaped the world, NPCs would change their dialogue or pop up in new locations if their personal sidequests were completed. With a small map, it wasn't a huge issue to change a handful of locations here and there. Finally, I had a few NPCs that kept busy healing flowers or just wandering about. This worked fairly well, but it was cumbersome to accomplish and resulted in myriad bugs--some of which ended up being shipped!In Chapter 2, I took things a step further by doing even more relocations and adding a quest that completely changed the aesthetic and audio of an entire map. It was lots of work--worth it--but a great deal of time for something only some players would experience and only when they traveled to the end of the earth.

Now, as I lay the groundwork for Chapter 3, I'm redoing certain NPCs and adding a whole new class of immersion. I've devised a method (it's not too complicated--I just didn't think of it earlier) that lets me split an NPC into as many clones as I want without creating an exponential amount of work. I also have much more control over what they say and when, so I can boost a quest convo to the top temporarily or have them respond to a world event with much more precision than a standard event. Players may not notice a ton of difference, but this drastically reduces the amount of scripting necessary to keep things running smoothly.

The best example of these changes is probably Helen. She starts the game in a hut then moves to Lake Calypso for the rest of eternity. While there, she is involved in a major plot point and offers two sidequests over two chapters.
Ostensibly, she is an important storyteller within the community...but she never tells any stories and her work is limited to asking for a few pens. With her Mobile Update, she'll travel the world at several points in the game while staying in place during a few key quests. Currently, she's slated to appear in over half a dozen locations where she will be working on some task or the other. Players can speak to her to have the option of hearing a story related to her current task or--if she's completed that story--to hear any of her completed stories or one of a few extras that she'll be able to tell with no pre-requisite quest. Listening to these stories will not only give a deeper look into the world of Whisper and how Zoids and humans came to coexist but will also give access to new content as Helen completes her tasks.

There are a couple of other NPCs slated for the initial rollout as well. Kealani, who previously hung out in the Sky Temple, will now travel the world with his shop. Tavin, who previously holed up in a tent, will soon be found honing his knowledge in various locations. Meanwhile, Minette already makes temporary use of this system and Mathilde Gavrielle has elements of an early version.This is just one of the major systems I'm working to implement prior to chapter 3. I'll have news on another soon--it's ready to show, technically, but it'll need its own post. Look out for that in a day or so~