Will NPCs be killable? Should They?

With this game, i think back to fallout (all of them) and how you could slaughter everyone, steal everything and become the biggest bandito in all of the wasteland. My question is, should we be able to kill the NPCs that come our way? Now hopefully there would be precautions in killing people, so you would only kill them if you meant it. So, bottom line: Killable people or not?

 

It has been confirmed that you can steal from NPC's, but I didn't hear anything about murdering them. Maybe we can conduct scientifical experiments on them and turn them into lab-made monsters!!!! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!

 

Yes there should be killable people, but with great consequences. Or if they are evil NPCs
you get to fight them to the death. They should all be able to fight back in some way.

 

depends, if the npc is important/ irreplaceable, then no. but if its just some random dood, then yes...because I want to be evil.

 

If some can respawn

 

Looking to Bethesda's games, some characters are made "essential" and can't be killed, such as those connected to important quests. This may or may not work, because Starbound is randomly generated. Also, This may not be a good idea because attacking an NPC would probably aggro the rest of the NPCs in that area, and I want to run around swinging my weapons like a madman without aggro-ing a mob of Aztec bird-people.

 

There should be something like if they are generated with a related quest, they cant die.

 

I think NPCs should have a "safety feature." I.E., if you try to attack them, you will take an insane amount of damage and explode into pieces.
That would be hilarious. Accidents, though...

 

Not at all.Remember good ol' morrowind?If you kill pepole related to the main quest,you fuck up the save.

 

We arn't talking about morrowind at all.

Anyway, you just broke your idea. 'If you kill them, you ruin the save'. Starbound doesnt really have automatic backups, so uh...

 

Well, I suppose important NPCs could always be replaced by clones.

Haha, can you imagine talking with Edward # 56... "*sigh* I'm starting to get tired of this!"

 

Somewhat inspired by Fallout New Vegas: Old World Blues, you should be able to set up pacifier fields (like the one preventing people from harming others on the space station.) to keep homeworld inhabitants pacified and docile. (Also FriendOrFoe detection on weapons, so you don't accidently snipe your friends in the back by "accident") Apart from that, you shouldn't be prevented from killing whatever you want, and of course Free-For-All servers have no kind of protection, apart from on the Space Station.

 

In Terraria they were, and they spawned again

 

Maybe killable in random villages, but unkillable on Home planets, ships and Space stations?
Even if there was no option to attack NPCs some genius would still pour lava on the NPCs or dig huge pits under them.
So if somebody wants to kill or hide NPCs that sell useful things on a big server he'll have other ways to do it anyway.

The universe is so impossibly huge that even if a server had 2000 people you'd still find millions upon millions of planets nobody else has ever been on.

These are my guesses/opinions anyway.
I haven't heard an official word on it.

 

I think you should be able to somehow toggle whether you hurt them or not. No idea how to apply that though.

 

I vote for an unforgiving system. Make some real enemies with murders and let the bloodbath begin.

Unless the developers find that to dark and violent.

 

They should be able to spawn again, so yes.

 

I sure hope you can kill anyone in Starbound, it would not feel like a true sandbox experience if you can't kill some NPC because game thinks you shouldn't. I assume NPC would respawn too, so there shouldn't be a need to not let player attack and kill anyone he/she wants.

However if they want to keep it interesting they can make it so NPCs that you kill would get pissed at you and you would have to do few quests for them before they will allow you to use their skill/shop or w/e they are good for.

 

Not quite true. You can kill some essential npcs and still complete the main quest. Albeit it becomes a bit harder seeing as you have to

Kill a god

Also: 'save often and in multiple slots' is good advice.

But when they made the essential characters unkillable, until they were no longer needed, I hated that. someone posted a video a while back about The Elder Scrolls : The dumbing down which had a section about this. But I'm moving away from the topic too far now.

For Starbound It depends on how the npc's are implemented. for example: npc's in a village/town/city on random planet xyz should definately be killable, but I hope if you kill one the rest get angry so then you have to kill them all, or get the hell outta there before they kill you.
NPC's that join you on your spaceship: Killable, but the player should be unable to damage them directly, you could set a bomb to explode next to them, but, at the risk of damaging your spacecraft I suppose. And enemy attacks (pirate boarding parties anyone?) should damage your ship npcs too

 

i talked about this earlier on a different thread and people frowned upon it. Is it that awful to kill npcs and take the loot? but yes, npcs should be killable imo. (maybe no important ones)