Do me a favour real quick.
Close your eyes, and think of the first name that pops into your head when I say, NPC.
If you’re feeling particularly helpful, go ahead and share that in the comments, I’d
love to know who you thought of.
Did you think of Sans, the cheeky skeleton and secret boss from Undertale?
Did you think of Kass, the accordion-playing parrot from Breath of the Wild and (hopefully)
Tears of the Kingdom?
Or maybe you thought of Monika.
Just, Monika.
Or did you think of someone smaller?
A bit player who has still made an impact on gaming culture.
Someone who likes shorts, or who is, apparently, an error?
Non-player characters, which is to say, game characters that the player doesn’t control
for the bulk of the game, are the lifeblood of many a title.
Not all games have or need NPCs, but even games with bare bones non-player characters
use them for a significant amount of worldbuilding and exposition.
Many of these characters get overlooked, but they are vital to the gaming experience – and
when a game really nails its NPCs, they’ll stay with you long after the game is over.
A good NPC feels like a true friend (or a true enemy!) and it’s easy to suspend your
disbelief and see them, not as a collection of art assets, but as a living, breathing
person with emotions, wants, needs, and desires.
Recently, I’ve been obsessing over this question: what actually makes a great NPC?
Over the past year, in what little free time I have, I’ve been making a game, just for
fun.
It’s a very basic premise – you wander around a town and you talk to the people you
meet.
With such a simple premise, I’m aware that the NPCs need to be interesting and enjoyable
enough to hold the player’s interest.
So how do I do that?
Well, I asked the experts: all of you.
I asked who your favourite NPCs are, any why you love them.
Your answers were, of course, quite eclectic.
To paraphrase Tolstoy, all happy NPCs relationships are happy in their own way.
That said, there were certain patterns and trends that emerged in your answers, from
which I’ve come up with a list of things that can help make an NPC memorable, engaging,
and lovable.
But first, the true answer to the question, what makes a great NPC?
The player does.
None of this is possible without a suspension of disbelief.
Creativity is a collaborative process.
Whoever you thought of when I first said NPC?
That says as much about you as it does about the developers behind that game.
You were willing to use your imagination, to see a fictional character as alive, even
if only briefly, while playing the game.
One of the human brain’s great skills is seeing humanity in other people, animals,
and objects.
This serves an important evolutionary advantage – it’s easier to spot danger if your brain
fills in the blanks and assumes a shadow or movement around you is a person.
It has also helped us to grow together as a community.
The ability to see the humanity in others – people around us, animals, even our infrastructure
– helps encourage compassion, cooperation, and trust.
Humans are designed to love others, even if that other is a sword with human eyes for
some reason.
Our instinctive anthropomorphism can only reach so far, though, without prompting.
People donate a lot more money, for example, to charities that look after animals that
look more like humans than, say, insect charities.
Even though we all really need bees to not go extinct.
Sometimes, our innate desire to see a familiar human spark in the world around us needs a
little push.
From your comments, it’s clear that the easiest push to make an NPC engaging and interesting,
is humour.
This makes sense.
Leaving aside the world of video games, scientific studies have shown that humour is the number
one most important factor in human attractiveness – if two people share a sense of humour,
they are far more likely to fall in love.
So, we have characters like Sans from Undertale, who endears himself to the player instantly
by... telling some of the worst jokes imaginable.
Sans’ puns are the perfect introduction to his character.
They hook you in quickly and establish that this little guy a bundle of fun, the kind
of character who doesn’t take things too seriously and is just a light-hearted goof.
…Then… the rest of the game happens.
Sans’ humour is important not just for establishing his role in this part of the story, but also
for setting the tone of the Snowdin chapter of the game.
Sans arrives at a time when the game has been getting a little more serious, and his arrival
punctures some of the dramatic tension and emotional weight that has been building up.
Any good NPC will communicate as much about the world as they do about themselves.
That might mean explicitly telling you what each button on your controller does, or establishing
some of the lore and backstory to the place you’re exploring.
An interaction with an NPC, whether a major player in the story or simply a random townsperson
with a single line of dialogue, should teach you something meaningful.
If a game features too many conversations that are just empty patter, before long, players
will learn that there’s no point actually engaging with the NPCs along the way.
A good NPC conversation should feel like an essential part of understanding the game,
should provide some new, vital piece of knowledge.
Some games will try to get around this by having NPCs yell out exposition, unprompted,
as the player walks past, but while this can be an effective way of delivering information,
if the player doesn’t actually want to talk to an NPC, we’re unlikely to remember the
interaction for very long.
For an NPC to be memorable, they need to be the kind of character that the player enjoys
talking to.
We should want to seek them out at the start of any new phase of the game to see what new
dialogue they have to offer.
Take the guard from Fire Emblem: Three Houses as an example.
His unbridled optimism and friendly nature make him a pleasure to interact with, even
if just for a moment as we’re busy scurrying around engaging with the game’s more noteworthy
characters.
This was another trend in your responses to my initial question.
What makes you want to talk to an NPC, rather than skip them entirely?
It helps if they’re likable and, this word came up repeatedly, charming.
Now, of course, charm comes in many forms.
This doesn’t just mean that a character should be sycophantic or overly sweet to the
player.
One of my personal favourite NPCs is the dastardly Linebeck from The Legend of Zelda: Phantom
Hourglass, who’s more than a bit of a cad.
A kind of cowardly Han Solo, only in it for the money, and with a history of ruining the
lives of people around him.
All of this is what makes him so much fun, even as he’s strangling my avatar or making
life more difficult for me.
Plus, he’s got an absolute banger of a theme tune.
Now, if being inherently charming and enjoyable to talk to was an easy skill, we’d all be
doing it all the time in real life.
As someone who is a bit of a charisma vacuum myself, I can attest to how difficult it is
to be witty and fun and generally just nice to talk to.
Crafting interesting NPCs takes work.
Depending on the game and its genre, getting dialogue interactions just right take a significant
number of revisions.
Portal 2 is one of the most heavily playtested games in the history of the medium.
The team at Valve came up with an interesting idea called F-Stop, built a game around it,
playtested it extensively, discovered that people were disappointed that the game didn’t
actually have portals, then scrapped the entire F-Stop game and started from scratch.
Every level was fine-tuned to perfection to ensure that every single puzzle was perfect.
The perfect difficultly, the perfect number of moving parts and signposting, they even
polished the motion of the game to a level where they could be sure that it gave players
the least possible motion sickness.
And, they playtested NPC dialogue.
Extensively.
How well did jokes land, how did players react to characters, did the NPCs elicit the correct
emotional response?
Not only did playtesting inform the puzzles of the game, but the character arcs that the
NPCs go through.
I don’t normally like to do spoilers in these videos, but... it’s Portal 2.
Is it okay to spoil Portal 2 at this point?
Said writer Jay Pinkerton: “When we playtested, we found a very stark
difference between this imperious, all-powerful GLaDOS talking to you, and this powerless
GLaDOS talking to you on your gun.
And what we discovered was, point blank, no one wants to hear this woman telling you you’re
an awful person, dumb and fat, while she’s sitting on your gun.
People were asking, ‘Why am I carting this person along?’
By a matter of necessity GLaDOS needed to have a character shift.
She’s going to be your sidekick - she can’t just be needling you for a half hour.”
So the narrative arc for GLaDOS, and, by extension, the whole narrative message of the game, came
about because of extensive playtesting.
Now, it’s not particularly inspiring to hear the story of a very well-funded game
project that had extensive playtests thrown at it until it was polished to perfection,
but while most games just won’t have that level of resources, it is worth bearing in
mind that characters can benefit from player feedback just as much as any other aspect
of a game.
After all, the point of an NPC is ultimately to simulate, in some form, an interaction
between two living things.
Depending on the game, as with Portal, that relationship between the player and characters
they meet will change and develop over time.
Another of the common themes in your comments on your favourite NPCs was the fun of seeing
a character go through their own story arc which isn’t necessarily always connected
to that of the player.
These can be big plot points for the game – a rival in a Pokemon game learning a lesson,
for example, or developing a closer relationship with Sojiro in Persona 5 and learning more
about his family and backstory.
Or, these can be little things – background characters who have different dialogue at
different stages in the game, giving you a reason to check back in on them regularly
to see how their lives are progressing.
In a video game, you as the player are often the centre of all the action; the world often
revolves around you.
(Literally, if you’re playing Katamari Damacy.)
NPCs with their own character arcs helps to give the sense that they’re off on their
own, separate adventures – it helps to create the illusion that the game’s setting is
larger than the one story that you’re experiencing yourself.
This is, ultimately, the point of NPCs in general – to make a world feel lived-in,
and a little less barren.
With this, also, we get the sense that a character is relatable.
We can see a little bit of ourselves in their struggles, or at least empathise with the
challenges they face.
Empathy is gold dust for characters in any work of fiction.
Take a character like Groose from The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.
Good old Groose.
Someone who, at first, feels like little more than a one-dimensional archetype.
He’s Gaston, right?
From Beauty and the Beast?
There’s not much more going on there.
But, as the story progresses and the player spends more time with Groose, we learn about
his wants and needs, and we see him struggle with challenges.
Before long, that empathy kicks in, and we start to see this character in a new light.
What would otherwise feel like nothing more than a caricature is given greater depth,
all because the player is forced to spend some time with Groose, see a little more of
what’s going on inside his heart.
The nice thing about this process is that, as mentioned, we as players are eager to fill
in the gaps ourselves.
To do some of the emotional and creative legwork in finding humanity in characters that, of
necessity, are limited in how much they can display believable intelligence and adaptability.
It helps that gaming is inherently a medium that encourages this kind of emotional investment.
Anyone playing a game is projecting themselves into a story; wilfully putting themselves
in the shoes of a character that exists outside of themselves.
This could easily be a video in its own right, but, when doing all of this to identify with
a player character, it’s not that much more effort to develop empathy for other characters
within the game as well.
So, what makes a great NPC?
You do, as the player.
You make a collection of pixels into an imaginary friend.
Great NPCs come from an open, honest, trusting creative collaboration between game designers
and game players.
It helps when a character is inherently charming, fun, or makes the player feel good about themselves.
It helps when NPCs go through their own character development and are shown to learn and grow,
just like the player.
Ultimately, though, all of this can only go so far.
It’s only when the player then engages with a character and chooses to overlook a game’s
limitations, to see a character as alive, that the NPC becomes truly great.
So, the moral of the story: if you’re wondering why you’re obsessed with Kass from Breath
of the Wild… you’ve got nobody to blame but yourself!