Sometimes to chill out I watch timelapse videos of ocean creatures such as starfish colonising patches of sea floor. Perhaps they’re gracefully devouring a seal’s carcass, or moving to escape a lethal descending finger of ice. Look, I’m quite a morbid guy, but ‘beauty of nature’ and all that.
It turns out there’s an equivalent in Warhorse’s recent RPG-palooza Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2: drop dozens of items in a random town square, and passing NPCs will gradually gather them all up according to preferences dictated by class. Here’s a video showing that in action, created by Redditor Mcloganator, with three thousand groschen worth of goods to harvest.
[KCD2] Timelapse of 300 thousand Groschen worth of goods being scavenged from the streets of Kuttenberg.
byu/Mcloganator inkingdomcome
(Here is a link, in case you can’t see the video embed.)
Hypnotic, yes? We could do with this kind of thing in Bethesda games. The Reddit video has now been circulated on the Xeetbox, and Warhorse programmer and open world scripter Patrik Papšo has chimed in with some thoughts about the social systems powering such wholesome feats of litter collection.
“Haha, that’s an NPC behaviour I made!” he wrote. “They choose what they pick based on the value of the item and their social status. That’s why nobles might ignore cheap items, but beggars will pick them up.” Under the game’s node-based AI system, Papšo explained in a subsequent tweet, when an NPC sees an object dropped by a player, the system checks its price against the NPC’s own “social multiplier”, then checks to see if another NPC is already picking it up.
Papšo also has some insights in that tweet thread about roads-not-taken. For example, Warhorse once had a system whereby if you dropped a stolen item, the original owner might spot it and trace the theft back to you. The developers cut this feature, however, because it was too difficult for players discarding dozens of items to make the connection between a particular item and suddenly being accused of a crime. There was also once a bug whereby if an NPC “reserved” an object for collection and the player picked it up first, they might filch it from your inventory instead.
The soothing, glacial spectacle of Kuttenberg townsfolk swarming a heap of worn-out gambesons aside, I like all this because I can imagine a game where NPCs actively acquire, exchange or discard objects, and you entertain yourself simply following an object’s passage from hand to hand. Imagine somebody nicking your favourite boots early on, and flogging them over the black market. A few dozen hours later, you spy somebody else innocently wearing them while traversing a mountain pass.
There’s probably a simulation that does this? Right now, I can think only of how dwarves claim items for their own use in Dwarf Fortress.