[cgh]

Perhaps this explains why Fromsoft npc quests are easily the most inscrutable in all of gaming. Like, okay Hyetta, have another “grape”, aka eyeball, oh now you’ve moved to the bridge in Liurnia, cool. I’ve exhausted your dialogue but you’re stuck. Oh I have to reload the area and exhaust it again to advance your quest. Okay, cool. Now you’re in a random church and you want a “fingerprint grape”. What?

It’s all part of the Fromsoft experience but man, who writes these things?

[vector_spaces]

RE who writes these things: I know you're probably referring to code here but on the actual dialogue side, there was a charming interview recently with the person responsible for translating Miyazaki's vision into English. He apparently did all of the writing (dialogue, item descriptions, UI text) for Dark Souls, and split the work with just one other person for all the later games including Elden Ring.

https://youtu.be/vIbKALhzHVc?si=WRAQs77WG2QwVkt5

More topical, I do actually appreciate some of the persistent jankiness like this that hasn't changed since their original games. They experimented with different approaches in DS3, where certain NPCs you encountered would essentially evaporate after you exhausted their dialogue, and they would later materialize back in the hub. I personally hated this -- one element I really enjoyed in the earlier games was this sense that the world doesn't revolve around you. The NPCs feel like rich characters with their own goals and motivations

Having them leave when you're finished talking to them sort of reduced them to utilities, which of course they are ultimately, but the gamefeel suffered a bit from making that more explicit. Don't me wrong though, I love DS3, but I didn't care for that particular change

Anyway, handling NPC progression in this way where the player needs to reload the area is more about navigating a technical limitation than anything else. But like many constraints it conspires with others to produce a certain gamefeel that I enjoy. It would feel a bit less impactful if Hyetta just moved on the instant I exhausted her dialogue -- it's more interesting for me to return and see that she has moved on

Another example of this sort of thing is FromSoft supposedly historically being bad at animating eyes, hence many critical NPCs being blindfolded or with faces hidden by helmets or otherwise obscured. This imagery plays nicely with their other sensibilities around character design and is thematically pretty rich

[bee_rider]

This post seems to be mostly (although not entirely) concerned with the combat AI. The plot based NPC interactions don’t seem to be very dynamic at all, mostly just a graph with a lot of dead-ends, haha.

[tancop]

thats game design not something engine related. its been like this since before demons souls, i think it started out way back with the first kings field. its just the way fromsoft do things. everyone knows what to expect from them.

[mostlysimilar]

Just to underline your point, Sekiro's NPCs behave in a much more obvious and linear way relative to From's other games, so it's clearly a game design decision and not a technical one.

[cgh]

Yeah, I’ve been playing these games since DS1 (currently on my umpteenth DS3 run as I recover from surgery). The quests never fail to make me laugh.

[bigyabai]

Especially in Elden Ring, it also contributes to the ludonarrative cohesion. Hyetta's quest (no spoilers!) isn't meant to be completed by everyone, her story is a foil to Melina's "default" questline that is mandatory for beating the game. Other characters (eg. Boc, Sellen, Selivus, Thops) also have quests that are easy to start but deliberately obfuscated towards the end.

The JRPG logic is annoying, but From uses it to beg important questions about the game world and the player. Fromsoft characters like Lautrec live in infamy for being so slippery and deliberately misleading.

[badprose]

They're victims of success. Lautrec was so infamous some people (read: me) are too scared to play the game without a guide now. "What if I missed some NPC and I can't level up anymore?!"