Regarding the player reputation system, beyond basic good/evil alignment, will career choices/actions also play into their reputation and the way they interact with NPCs and the rest of the universe? And if so, to what extent?asked by MACV1RUS
TL;DRThe writers want a non-binary, grey reputation system with separate standing with each organization, and hope NPCs will react to a player's reputation, though design is still being worked out.
Kind of like a big part of when we were approaching how we were going to be handling the reputation system... as the writing team we didn't really like some of the way other games handled alignments with having it be very binary where it is good and evil. It feels a lot of times in games like that that you're only making one choice - you make a choice at the beginning, "Am I going to be good or evil?" - and after that you're not really making choices, you're just sticking with that initial one.So, we're really big fans of grey alignments... in every situation you're in, you're asking yourself, "What is my character going to do in this situation?" And not knowing a clear result of your actions. You know, if you want to slap someone because they're acting crazy then... maybe they'll thank you for it or maybe they'll be really pissed and try to stab you. That kind of thing.I think that will tie a lot into how the reputation system works - where all of these different organizations that you can work with or against will have their beliefs and their moralities and your actions will get them to feel more positively towards your character or more antagonistic... and that's kind of how the reputation goes.
It seems like we want the scale to be more dynamic than just a simple bar - towards good or towards bad. That can definitely be affected much like how we have multiple ship companies and multiple weapon companies and they all have their own goals and the same thing here when you have different guilds, when you have different things you are going to be interacting with. They're all going to have their own scale to a certain degree that will kind of factor into this. So, the end goal is to definitely make it more dynamic than we've seen in a lot of games.
And, at a certain point when your reputation starts getting high enough, hopefully we can - we're still working on all this with design - but hopefully start incorporating things where the NPCs are reacting to you appropriately. Like, if you get really high reputation with the bounty hunting guild - you're a really well known bounty hunter - then criminals will start being aware of that reputation and start acting accordingly and start being more antagonistic towards you or avoiding you altogether, depending on their own personality. So, there's all of these interesting dynamics that can come out of the reputations and how you play with other groups that, if we can pull off, will be really kind of neat. So, we have a lot of work to do but...
It's very exciting. It's definitely something we're looking forward to digging in to and really getting the details figured out for that.
Yeah, we've been really flexing our muscles on this in Squadron 42 and hopefully we'll be talking about more of that conversation system and then really seeing these initial phases and how it's just going to explode wildly when it gets into the persistent universe in an awesome way.
Very cool.