I have never even thought about killing NPC's that i cant hire, just for XP and loot.

The notion that some you did, disturbs me and makes me mourn about humanity.

Morals and ethics should be nothing you need to put into game mechanics.

Just my2 eurocent.

People will do what they can get away with; That's why we have civil society. Otherwise, as Hobbes put it, life "in the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short". Mostly "short", in the case of game NPCs Think of a morality system as the game's version of "laws" that keep you from acting purely out of mechanical self-interest (ie. the fastest, easiest way to gain xp or to deny your foes an advantage).

Ah, a libertarian ! Ya, I agree with you -- we are hideously overregulated in the Western world. However, no civil society at all is even worse (Somalia, anyone ?). We'd all be going around murdering NPCs for a few gildars

I'm with Denryu -- one of the great things about this game is that it's "alive;" it's not just putting you at the controls of some contraption. Such a system would be "stripping it down to the mechanics," and that's bad. I don't want to be "going to work" when I boot up this game like if I boot up WoW or X3 or many other games.

I want it to be our intelligence at work -- if you kill this guy, there will be consequences; his friends will hate you and probably want vengeance. I don't need some meter to tell me that...I don't want some meter to tell me that. I don't want a "hand-holder."

Without going into "essay mode," we as gamers are too used to (just because it's so prolific) getting things spoon-fed to us, but that rips the soul right out of the experience, and actually distances us from what we're playing. We can go get cereal down from the shelf ourselves.

It's all in what you want...do you want a living world, or a world-like construct with which you can interface?

I'm all for the living world.


Plus, I think Osiris is right...you don't have to put morals and ethics into games. I'll take it a step further: doing that adds unnecessary clutter that, unless the game is specifically designed for it (and I don't tend to like those games, myself), it drags the whole game down.

Barbarians beat you up and take money, civilized people don't need to beat you up to take your money.

I did this accidentally I thought at first that right clicking would let me interact with them, but instead I just ended up attacking. Maybe the default option when right clicking neutral NPCs should be to open the recruit screen? If you say no there, you can choose to attack.

Of course, running across someone in the wilderness and killing them, no one else would know what you did. How would other NPCs know?

kind of crappy that i can kill weak scientist or merchants or heroes (who description claims to be defending the land), just b/c i want the XP and nothing bad happens.

I usually do this so i boost my heros movement from a pathetic 1 to like 3 or 4. So really, killing people off the bat might be a better move early in the game.

But i still think their needs to be a downside to all this

afaik the recruitment prices for other npc starts to rise if you start killing them. that is least what i encountered, after killing some adventurers the merchants, inventors and farmers did cost a lot more to recruit.

You are right of course, it just makes me so sad sometimes.

Overall, I tend to agree something should happen. Perhaps the more NPC's you kill the less come around your territory. Wandering NPCs would probably share notes when they met and notice after a while no one comes out of there with a job or alive. Also the experience is too high for killing them.

In my beta 2 preview, I do indeed slaughter many adventurers out in the world. But I also point out it's because that it's this beta, and there are a lack of lower level monsters to level up on.

http://gorstagg.wordpress.com/

They are available in HD for those who feel that urge to watch them in that version.

Good idea, and the bolded part is very important. If you merely increase hiring cost, the situation becomes worse - I couldn't afford to hire the last guy, so I killed him, now the next guy comes along and wants more - what do you think I'll do? I'll just kill them all, I can't afford them anyway, I may as well deny them to my enemies. Having them attack the player is similarly problematic; I was going to kill them for xp anyway, if they start attacking me it just makes killing them off much easier. Both of these punishments do nothing to players that have written off hiring NPCs at all, in fact they encourage more killing.

But if killing neutrals decreases the costs for your enemies to hire them, perhaps even to the point that they're flocking to your enemies for free if you slaughter enough, this changes the entire dynamic. Killing them is no longer a valid way to keep them away from your enemies, it accomplishes just the opposite.

Not that players should never kill the neutral NPCs, I don't want to see that possible playstyle taken away entirely - it should just have consequences, real consequences that do not encourage even more NPC-killing.