NPCs: A Low-Art Solution To Greatly Enhance Bases

Originally Posted by Me

The other day, while taking my character to a random Arbiter to gain his level up, I was struck by the thought "This is silly, there's an Arbiter in my Villain Group. Why can't she level me up?" and then it all clicked... Base functions can be added with minimal new art by adding one thing...

-Customizable NPCs that function as items. They would work as follows.

-First, select your type of contact. The options could be, for example,
---Arbiter/Hero
---Fateweaver/Hero Corps Analyst
---WW/Market contact
---Tailor
---NPC

-Second, place that contact in the base. They may be restricted by room, or they may be free to be placed anywhere. Dev's discretion. The NPC style would be placeable anywhere. They would then appear as Wireframes, similar to the AE building wireframes.

-Anyone with base editing privileges would have the option when speaking to any of these characters to change their name, costume, and Info, as normal for a custom critter. Arachnos outfits would also be an option, as would using any custom critter you'd bought in AE, with the exception of unique characters: you can't have Ms. Liberty in your base, but you can have a standard Longbow Guardian. NPC types would also include the option for a text of dialogue.

-Finally, once set up, anyone in the Super Group could speak to them, and they would function as a contact of their type, either allowing you to level up and such, change your difficulties, change outfits, or use the tailor. NPC types would simply have a dialog box pop up that you could then close.


This would require NO new art, allow a great deal of customization to the bases, and allow an easy way for much more functionality to be added to bases.

Other possibilities that they could do would include...
-Wandering around your base, or around a specific room [For NPC types only]
-Be able to be placed with various standard emotes
-If base raiding ever happens, turn into enemies that help defend your base, with powers chosen similarly to AE, except prestige and power cost would determine how strong (For example, minions would be rather cheap, wheras putting an AV in your base could cost over a million prestige and a large amount of Control.)



I'm under the impression that Low Art is important as someone mentioned in one of the Panels that were posted on the site the possibility of adding such things to the base. He said that the capability already exists, and they're just waiting on the art. The artist then said he's been working on Going Rogue, and would have to design something awesome and unique for each such thing.

Hopefully, if I get enough support from people here, the developers will see that we don't need new art for this if you allow us to create the art by ourselves. We've got a robust character creator, one bragged about as one of the best aspects of City of Heroes, and we'd all love to use it to create our own butlers, sidekicks, tech support guys, or even just put ourselves in our bases to greet newcomers.

Originally Posted by CapnGeist

1) I'm sure it has, but our search function is godawful and I haven't seen it.

Originally Posted by CapnGeist

Part of the idea here is to give more incentive for people to use SGs. Right now most SG Bases are just Teleport Stations. What they SHOULD be is your one stop for pretty much whatever you need.