The Living Population of NPCs is a fascinating addition \u2013 what does that offer the player?<\/p>\n
Fulton: The Living Population is our cast of over 1,000 NPCs, each with roles, personalities and routines. That whole concept of persistent NPCs, each of whom is unique in a whole bunch of ways that you can go and interact with and mess about with, is incredibly complex.<\/p>\n
When you start working on it, you realize that every settlement has to have enough houses with enough beds, for everyone in the settlement to go and sleep in at the end of the day. It was a fun day when we explained that particular requirement to our environment art team [laughs], but they rose to the challenge like they do with everything.<\/p>\n
In games, you don\u2019t normally have to connect the dots quite so precisely. You know, you\u2019re just building a nice-looking town. But in Fable it also has to be a functional town.<\/p>\n
As an example, early in development we couldn\u2019t work out why one town was so empty during the day. And when we zoomed out into debug mode, it was because NPCs were getting up to go to work, but they lived too far away from their jobs. So, they started walking to work, but didn\u2019t get there before their schedule told them to turn around to go back to bed.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s required a lot of working through, but it pays off because, honestly, as you play the game, you get to know the names of the individual NPCs. You get to know what they like, what they\u2019re looking for in a partner, where they live, where they work, all that kind of cool stuff. It\u2019s an extra dimension to traditional NPCs.<\/p>\n
Does the Living Population tie into the main quest?<\/p>\n
Fulton: Tying the main quest and the Living Population together in a really overt way didn\u2019t seem like the right way to go, so we\u2019ve deliberately linked them in the lightest possible fashion. You know, there are some times when characters in the main quest will reference your reputations, or the things you\u2019ve done previously \u2013 but we never want to force a player to have to go and interact with those things in order to progress the main quest.<\/p>\n
We know there are some players \u2013 we call them \u2018Bards\u2019 \u2013 who are just going to play through the main story. They\u2019re going to start at the start, and they\u2019re going to get to the end, and that\u2019s going to be their experience. That\u2019s entirely fine, that\u2019s a totally respectable way to play.<\/p>\n
But there are some players, who we call \u2018Architects\u2019, who we know are going to go and mess around with the systems and just see where they can push them, see what they can achieve with it, and we want them to have the freedom to do that at any point as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Living Population of NPCs is a fascinating addition \u2013 what does that offer the player? Fulton: The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":423614,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[7253,34475,45257,2210,199722,2877,12391,2646,74,1298,129248],"class_list":["post-423613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-cloud","tag-fable","tag-game-pass","tag-pc","tag-playground-games","tag-playstation-5","tag-rpg","tag-steam","tag-technology","tag-xbox","tag-xbox-series-xs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=423613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423613\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/423614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=423613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=423613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=423613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}