Seeing as NPC’s are about as complete of a feature in this game as saying a square of cardboard is my next science project (hint: it usually is), I wonder if making a suggestion about said incomplete NPC’s is futile. Then I remember I don’t give a durn and just want to get it out for future reference.
Essentially I’m alluding to a “trust” system where, over time, any NPC’s you have following you (once they stop breaking the ingame universe in half) will begin to trust you more. This essentially means you can give them orders the longer they chill with ya.
I got this idea from Rogue Survivor, which has a similar system.
The reason for this is simply it doesn’t make much sense for your apocalypse buddy that you’ve been friends with for a month to still require you to trade something of equal or greater value for a can o’ beans when you’re starving and he’s hoarding the food.
Eventually this will lead to the two/three/four of you fighting zombies with the power of FRIENDSHIP! Except you’ll still die, because the game hates you. And, hell, if you want to roleplay you could assume that the survivor of opposite (or same, I won’t discriminate) gender becomes your bedfellow, though I’m going to say that probably doesn’t need to be reflected ingame at all. Just pretend, I guess.
On a mechanical level, I have utterly no idea for how long it should take for the trust level to “build”, and I’ll leave the balancing aspects to your devs which are invariably smarter than I am in this regard unobvious brownnosing. However I feel that while trust should build (albeit slowly) over time, participating in a fight with them (or killing something that’s near them while they’re low on health, in a “I just saved yo life mang” kinda way) would be a good way to get a jump in the trust values. Like, say, shooting a cougar off them with your crossbow after they had their eye ripped out?
Any thoughts? Or am I just blowin’ hot air around?