Hello everyone, The current update, Pleased Giraffe (also known as Colony update) is oriented towards NPCs and colonisation. It made the NPCs look more alive, more realistic and just better in general : actions like warming their hands next to a fire, waving and such. Dialogues between NPCs were also reworked and we can all see the progress that has been made. It has been said by the developers that the next update, while being mainly oriented towards combat, will also bring more depth to NPCs and their behavior through randomly generated quests and maybe more. Currently in the game (as far as I know), villages are simply considered as dungeons, full of NPCs. Some are agressive and some are passive. Avian villages for example, are full of passive NPCs and passive guards that will only attack you if you attack a citizen or keep your weapons out for too long. On the other hand, Avian tombs and temples are full of agressive NPCs that shoot you on sight. Some dungeons, like the Apex laboratory, are full of guards and scientists that will attack you only if you trespass. So there is two distinct types of villages : the friendly ones, and the not so friendly ones. The problem is that all NPCs (except the ones from the outpost) can be attacked and killed. Which is a good thing if they are hostile towards you, but a bad one if they are initially not. My point here is that quite often, a monster or two, usually birds, would attack the village. The guards shoot them, and if they are unable to kill them in time, die. If a villager is attacked and there are no guards around, oftentimes he would die before he had the chance to escape. You can't help the villagers and the guards in defending the village, because if you happen to have your weapons out for too long, guards will turn hostile towards you. The same happens if you hurt a villager while trying to save his life. The main point of friendly villages is that you can rest in them, gather some ressources/codexes and trade. Buying or selling stuff can be useful in the early-game, and NPCs help you not feeling too alone. Moreover, if you wish to expand the village to build your home next to it, and let's say, start a colony, the first goal to you would be to keep them safe and try to get as many inhabitants as possible, because they give you ressources and, well... There would be no colony if there wasn't people to live in it right ? So my idea is that first of all, villages should be considered as more than dungeons. Implementing reputation in villages would go quite well along the planned randomly generated quests. Also, trading should be their main feature : in the early game (on harmless/mostly harmless planets for example) or when you have low reputation, you should only be able to buy simple items : low tier armor and weapons, low tier ores in limited quantity and such things. As you do quests and trading, or on higher difficulty planets, the items available should be better : rifles, higher tier ores in greater quantity, or anything that could be useful to an player in the end-game. The prices in the shop should be more appealing than the outpost's price, but to balance it, the rare items/ores should only be in limited quantity that would refill over real days (just like the daily rotation of Fröggs furniture's products). And why not a forge ? With some ores and pixels, you would be able to craft weapons with elemental bonuses that you can't craft anywhere else. You also could use it to upgrade your currently owned weapons, for example, some incendiary bullets for your Ferozium sniper rifle or making your blade shoot poisonous tar balls. The stronger the upgrade is, higher will be the cost in ores and pixels. You could unlock these upgrades just like you would get better items in the shop : higher tier planets or through quest grinding/reputation. And most of all : adding a way of disabling/enabling NPC damaging, so that way, you could fight along the village's guards and defend the villagers. This little tweak would not only help the addition of much more interesting features : hiring a mercenary, building an army for, let's say, some randomly generated quest that would require you to kill large amounts of monsters and mini-bosses, but also the colony mechanics and, in a much more general view, the NPC - Player interactions. I hope you like these ideas, and if you have any, please feel free to share them here. Criticism is welcome, but it is even more welcome if you have a better idea to share ! Thanks for reading my wall of text. TL;DR : Option to disable damaging friendly NPCs, and making villages better.
