Numen: Contest of Heroes Peek #4

The fourth Numen: Contest of Heroes peek on RPGVault looks at quests and RPG interaction.

When we designed NPCs in Numen, we tried to keep in mind several key goals. We wanted each one to have his or her place in the world, and to have a believable background story and/or motives. We wanted for as many of them as possible to be more than just common soldier or villagers so that when you get to, for example, a coastal settlement in Lybia, you are likely to meet individuals such as a lighthouse keeper who is grieving loss of her brother, a rude and greedy mayor, a cheeky and bold thief, and a proud native desert guide. We are trying hard to have NPCs that are interesting and memorable.

The second major objective point we set for ourselves was that we didn’t want the NPCs to be static. In many RPGs, they basically stay wherever you first meet them through the entire remainder of the game. When they have nothing new to say, their icons simply change or disappear. In Numen, there’s more than that. Some characters stay where they live, but others can travel across the world – this can even be triggered by the choices the player makes in the game. Some of them may even die. When, for example, a couple of years pass, you will find that relatively few of the characters you encountered previously are still where you left them.