NPC and player aggressiveness

After the successful topics of DeadlyLuvdisc, I'd like to imitate him and come back to a feature of the game that has only little details revealed about, namely aggressiveness, whatever the side is.

In many RPG/RPG-ish games (Especially sandboxes) out there, attacking NPCs is done in two ways : Either they can't be attacked/damaged at all (Only enemies can), or they can be attacked and will then turn hostile/flee/whatever.
It has been revealed that Starbound will be in the second category (One of the daily updates show a player attacking a civilian), however, every game I know in this category (Minus one) will consider any attack as a threat. Or, if you prefer, punching a chicken will turn the entire town hostile and everyone will try to kill you.
In most cases this is fine, excepted in one situation : When you are involved in a fight with at least a NPC neutral to you that you want to help. In this case, the problem is that you have a high chance to hit said NPC with your weapons especially if they are multi targeted or AoE. So you have to be extremely careful if you don't want to hurt the bad NPC. In 3D games, this is often less of a problem because you can most of the time sidestep so there is nobody in your line of fire. This is not doable in 2D games however, as hitting your "enemy" without hitting your "ally" will be hard. If you could hurt NPCs in Terraria, or have PvP always on, this would be a real problem.

One game, however, has a system that I think should be integrated with Starbound. This game, called Kindoms of Amalur : Reckoning (Also known as a Skyrim/Torchlight hybrid), has a pretty clever way to avoid this : Aggressive mode. By default, you can only hit enemies, friendlies won't even block your projectiles. If you wish to attack them however you can, for that you have to enter aggressive mode. It's really easy, to enter Aggressive mode one only has to press a hotkey while sneaking. In that mode, NPCs can be targeted and attacking one WILL hurt him and make him hostile. Aggressive mode automatically disengages whenever a NPC is hit (To avoid hitting someone not belonging to the attacked group/village) or after a few seconds. I think it's the ideal system : Easy to implement, easy to use and useful.

In latest Leth stream, I've also noticed something : There doesn't seem to be any way to see if a NPC or monster is friendly or hostile from afar - the only way to check is to come close, which can be problematic for ranged characters.

Thoughts ?

 

One thing I know is that if you attack a civilian, he will got to a guard asking for help

 

Yeah, that'd be cool if it was implemented.

I like this though, think of it this way: you are exploring planets which you've never been to before, how would you know what mobs will attack you? So It should be the way it is, but I'm also fine with the addition of some sort of equipment you can craft in really high tiers with which you can tell what mobs are aggressive or not. Maybe even some sort of "Pokedex" that keeps information about the different monsters you've encountered.

 

It would be great if NPCs had some sense of context to your agression. Attacking a peaceful NPC unprovoked should yield an immediate response, but a single hit in the heat of battle should be accepted as unfortunate friendly fire.

Ideally guards would also know the initial state of hostility of everyone towards each other, and be able to tell their potential allies based on that state. For example, if guards know the NPC they are fighting is also hostile to you, they would expect you to fight it, and be more accepting of taking some friendly fire during the process). But if the NPC the guard is fighting is friendly/neutral to you, they'd expect you to not get involved, and thus be less forgiving if you do get involved and land some hits on the guard as a result - for in this case, as far as the guard would be concerned, you and the NPC colluded in attacking the guard, warranting an immediate hostile response.

All this info can be deduced programmatically by the AI (it requires no guesswork, but only looking at some true/false variables, such as the aggression state of the player/guard/NPC, and the existing hostility state of all NPCs towards each other and the player). Therefore I think some of the above logic would be pretty simple to implement.

 

This kind of behavior is already implemented in a few games, but the biggest problem here is that the game is in 2D. Unlike 3D games where you can simply flank your enemy, the only way to get a clear shot here is to gain height - and for melee characters it's even worse as it's impossible to hit a NPC without hitting another if they are close to each other. This is why I think there should be some system to actually prevent attacks from hitting friendly NPCs unless I really want to.

 

I believe the devs have stated that you cannot even hold a weapon inside of villages; that means that they will first warn you about your weapon, but they will attack you if you ignores their warnings. This would solve the "accidentally killing civilian" problem, sure, but it would also make guards attack you that much often.

Here's the source:

http://playstarbound.com/8th-and-9th-october-progress/

 

Reminds me of the ncr in fallout 2.

 

I could never get that game to work on my laptop. But yeah, at least we'll get warnings first. I just hope I don't immediately go afk, whilst holding a weapon in a village because I didn't see the warnings.

 

Started with the new fallouts then later started playing 2, take alot of patience but I enjoy it. Would love a remake newer graphics and expanding on cut content and the story. I am not speaking of a fallout 3 style but classic style like xcom except keep more of the management stuff unlike what xcom did. Any way I got to off topic yeah hopefully there are warnings.

 

If the Guards don't want my help, then suit themselves. I'll sit down with some munchies & watch the Guards & Monsters scrap.

 

There should at least be a way to make peace with a planets guards.
Bringing a 10k Voxel in hand should be a sign of peace or something.
I had to slaughter an entire villages guards because i was "holding" a sword while buying items.
Luckily the vendors survives the blood bath, but really is the no weapon policy truly logical?
1/4 of the Vendors seem to be weapons vendors ...

 

i'm a little more partial to the morrowind system, where aggression was dynamically determined by four variables that depended on your reputations and current actions.

 

It's also annoying when Monsters come in to the Town & notice & attack you first & you can't defend yourself from these Monsters the Guards haven't noticed yet without danger of pissing off the Guards. :/

 

I feel like the boy who cried wolf every time I see a bird flying at the edge of a town, stuck on some roof. I know it's there, I know I want to attack it...but the guards don't notice it and will walk over to yell at me if I pull out a weapon.

Usually, I just remember that I'm a Floran and stab everything in sight. Other times, I have to leave town before killing the bird.