#37 NPC Community: Langeness Pt. 1

 In this post we're gonna take a look at NPC communities: How NPC are integrated into the gameworld, doing actions, reacting to events and being integrated in quests or small dialogs.

Quest Design in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

A neat article including this topic is one written by now Lead Acting Quest Designer Phillip Weber. It covers the technical process of creating quests and communities, explaining how in tools like REDkit or radish modding tools NPCs can have time-bound actionpoints in the world where they repeatedly exercise a certain "job", how they might have different phases in which they show different behaviour, and how they might react to dynamic events like rain. Here is the link:

Making Games Classics: Quest Design in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

A more abstract but interesting lesson is that quest designers, while obviously focused on getting quests done with the help of other developers, may also do related tasks like setting up a small scene which doesn't need much cinematography or creating a NPC community which simply enriches the environment the quest plays in.

A Witcher 3 Community: Langeness

In the last post I mastered stage six of the learning course dubbed "trial of radishes". Stage seven is about advanced communities: They should have special guarding or walk behaviours, or dynamic assignment of actions and such things.

From the task description it become evident that it would be sensible to design three communities, each fulfilling multiple criteria. First I thought of a place for them. The Witcher 3 is already quite filled with content, but my long roamings in Skellige reminded of the northern isles there, which are uninhabited and probably unknown to many.

Visiting this place, I decided to name it "Langeness", referencing a "Hallig" (a kind of small isle) in the North Sea to which I lived close for many years. Unfortunately the place wasn't as empty as memory told me: There were a lot of harpies which would later disturb my communities much too often. On the land I found three fitting places:

The majority of the communities NPCs were intended to be in the areas I, II and III, with

• I being a skellige pirate/warrior camp
• II being a couple of bears
• III being a couple os small monsters (ghouls or nekkers)

To make all this more interesting I decided to include some environmental storytelling. On the peaks at 1a-d I intended to place guards looking to the sea, but it turned out terrain probably wasn't plain enough, so I had to reduce this to guards at 2 only. At 3 some times one to two skelligers should show up, mocking a helpless fellow at 4, trapped by the bears. The bears are angry because at III some skelligers had killed one of them (although some skelligers themselves were killed), causing nekkers to appear.

The next post will dive into how I set up communities technically and which ideas guided me when faced with options.

Conclusion

I enjoyed writing this little impression of work that might very will be part of quest design. After all, quests often work with characters and these characters need a place in the world. A community.

Hope you're doing well - until next time!