Friendly NPCs

[Jammet]

Will there be friendly NPCs scattered in these places? Or even whole factions? What I loved about UW were that you met really interesting characters sometimes. Most of them don't have a lot of things to say, but they being there adds world building, as many had a bedroll and a candle, or a fire and some food, and most of them just introduced themselves, offered bartering, and gave you a little bit of advice or a hint.

[RatTower]

Hi,
Short answer: Yes.
There are friendly NPCs and some of them align with certain factions in the world. If you attack these NPCs your reputation with the faction will suffer until you are straight-up attacked on sight. There are ways to clear your record.

Sorry for taking so long to answer.

best wishes,
rattower

[Jammet]

Thanks so much for answering! :3 Doesn't matter that it took a while. I wonder if you can sneakily attack NPCs, so the faction won't know that it was you. Not sure how UW handled this. But I remember there were a bunch of grey goblins you could leave alone, or attack, and they guard at their fortress would know nothing of it.

Not that I wanna do that -- attack them -- but imagine if someone attempted to kill every single NPC in the game, how would the game handle it?

[RatTower]

At the moment the reputation system is not that intricate, but your scenario actually gave me an idea. Currently, any attack on a faction member deals reputation damage. In other words, the faction is "magically" notified of your misdeeds. That makes stealth kills a problem because, despite nobody noticing them, they still cause reputation damage.

There is a simple fix for that though: You just buffer the reputation damage and apply it after the end of combat, but only if an NPC survives.

There may still be a couple of corner cases but overall that should address the problem nicely. You might not see it in the demo, but I already made note of it.