A simple question: what's the most weird, foolish or downright hilarious thing you've ever caught a background NPC doing?
To clarify, I'm not talking about 'active' NPCs like AI teammates here. We all know that in a lot of games these guys are typically found dropping grenades at your feet like a pleased-with-itself puppy showing you a half-eaten pigeon it found. Or perhaps stood directly in front of your line of sight, seemingly inviting you to stick the barrel of your gun in their ear. They're morons, but usually well-meaning ones.
'Background' NPCs are the passive ones usually present as environmental decoration. Think chattering pedestrians in sandbox games, generic spice-merchants in the marketplace in an RPG, that sort of thing. Their behaviour can be a lot more mystifying when put under scrutiny.
As a recent example, me and my girlfriend just finished a co-op run through of Hunted: The Demon's Forge (a game that I actually managed to enjoy despite the game's best efforts to ensure that I wouldn't). One level takes place in a quarry with human slaves toiling away in the background, replete with mining picks and shovels. A sensible enough scenario you say? Then kindly explain to me the intentions of the half dozen slaves busily mining away on top of a wooden bridge spanning an enormous chasm. Eagerly they chipped away at their timber platform, apparantly mining for toothpicks. A wargar taskmaster encouraged them in this activity- presumably he thought that the other slaves actually mining rock were the stupid ones.
Another good example involves a bard in Assassins Creed Brotherhood who, seemingly tired of the music game, ran screaming down to a jetty and hurled himself into the water. There was no evident cause for this behaviour, so I assumed he had suddenly become aware of his own existence as background filler in a game, gone instantly mad and hurled himself to his death. Poor devil.
So please, share with me those moments when witnessing weird NPC behaviour that made you wonder just exactly what the hell was going on in those little digital heads of theirs.
To clarify, I'm not talking about 'active' NPCs like AI teammates here. We all know that in a lot of games these guys are typically found dropping grenades at your feet like a pleased-with-itself puppy showing you a half-eaten pigeon it found. Or perhaps stood directly in front of your line of sight, seemingly inviting you to stick the barrel of your gun in their ear. They're morons, but usually well-meaning ones.
'Background' NPCs are the passive ones usually present as environmental decoration. Think chattering pedestrians in sandbox games, generic spice-merchants in the marketplace in an RPG, that sort of thing. Their behaviour can be a lot more mystifying when put under scrutiny.
As a recent example, me and my girlfriend just finished a co-op run through of Hunted: The Demon's Forge (a game that I actually managed to enjoy despite the game's best efforts to ensure that I wouldn't). One level takes place in a quarry with human slaves toiling away in the background, replete with mining picks and shovels. A sensible enough scenario you say? Then kindly explain to me the intentions of the half dozen slaves busily mining away on top of a wooden bridge spanning an enormous chasm. Eagerly they chipped away at their timber platform, apparantly mining for toothpicks. A wargar taskmaster encouraged them in this activity- presumably he thought that the other slaves actually mining rock were the stupid ones.
Another good example involves a bard in Assassins Creed Brotherhood who, seemingly tired of the music game, ran screaming down to a jetty and hurled himself into the water. There was no evident cause for this behaviour, so I assumed he had suddenly become aware of his own existence as background filler in a game, gone instantly mad and hurled himself to his death. Poor devil.
So please, share with me those moments when witnessing weird NPC behaviour that made you wonder just exactly what the hell was going on in those little digital heads of theirs.
