NPC Fates

[Null Winter]

I may just be making a big deal about something that is not even a problem or is already predetermined and ironclad as part of Acid Wizards' plans, buuuut....

As some of the more homicidal players have mentioned, not much prevents you from murdering friendly, plot-important NPCs. The fact that they can permanently die at your hands leads me to believe that the developers may be planning to naturally kill some of them off through other methods as part of the overarcing story anyways. After all, certain NPCs already seem to have grudges against other characters.

While we can only speculate about some of the later plot points, I want to call out our friendly forest Wizards and suggest avoiding a railroaded "Everyone dies because of events you could not directly prevent" ending as one of the potential endgames. I do not expect many happy endings to be available in the finished game, but I would hate to just be playing along and then stumble across the corpses of the named characters because some mysterious entity killed them off-screen in a fit of plotderp.

In short, I'm expecting a few doomed NPCs in a horror game, but I really don't want to see all of them arbitrarily killed off for silly plot reasons or cheap emotional pulls. Does anyone else here expect an unnaturally high mortality rate for our few Darkwood allies?

[Linchiko]

I dont want to kill our shop keepers tbh and finishing the quest for Piotrek was a HUGE mistake. I feel like the bloodied hat did nothing much for me to keep it (chiken lady reacts but meh) and the toy spaceship without piotrek mean nothing so....

[zurium]

even with piotrek the toy ship is not much more useful

[Raptros]

I haven't gotten that feeling, though it could be very possible.

The way this game is handled reminds me a lot on how darksouls handles its players.

Heres the world, go have fun. You ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up? Sorry, shouldn't have done that.

[Null Winter]

Originally posted by Raptros:

I haven't gotten that feeling, though it could be very possible.

The way this game is handled reminds me a lot on how darksouls handles its players.

Heres the world, go have fun. You ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up? Sorry, shouldn't have done that.

Dark Souls is actually what I was thinking about when I typed up my original post. There are many times that a friendly enough character turns Hollow "just because" after they no longer have any quests or items for sale. It seemed rather paradoxical to have a content, happy (the opposite of Hollow) Pyromancer go Hollow just because he travelled to Blighttown to search for a different shopkeeper. A similar thing happened with our friendly Onion Knight in one of his possible endings. Solaire is an incredibly tough guy with a driven mission (again, something that prevents Hollowing), but a wimpy Sunlight Maggot can take him out if you do not perform an obscure and arbitrary task before a certain point in the game. It is just a cheap emotional pull on the part of the developers. "Oh, you actually like this guy, so now he's crazy for no reason so you have to kill him." I believe that Dark Souls 2 handled it better when characters actually stuck around unless they had other business outside of Majula for genuine side-plot reasons.