oookay. there has been a lot of talk about trading issues, and a lot of talk about pets, and I think I have an Idea that could make a lot of people happy.
so lots of people want to be able to bring pets around with them on their adventures. that’s great, but what if pets were more intelligent than that? maybe less like a pet and more like a sidekick? then you could solve a ton of problems that you have in a world with no NPC characters.
for example: you want to put up a shop in your beacon, but you don’t really want to stick around all the time, you have questing to do! so you leave your sidekick behind and put all the shop supplies in a chest. when someone comes looking to buy stuff, they talk to your sidekick.
example 2: you want to protect a town from invaders because they’re seiging your beacon or you don’t have enough materials to make one quite yet or whatever. so, you tell your sidekick to guard the south gate, and you go guard the north gate, or he guards the gates while you go down into your mine to finish getting the materials for your beacon.
see? you can make up for the lack of NPCs by giving the players characters to do whatever needs done. of course these characters probably would need limitations, like, you can’t tell them to break blocks, and you can’t tell them to go questing on their own, you’d need to lead them to wherever they go beyond a certain distance.
the potential here is limitless! if the devs were feeling adventurous, they could even make it so that you could tell these guys to do a trade route, but the path is dangerous, so you tell them to always wait for an adventurer to come along and offer to escort them. you could make a dungeon and post your sidekick outside to introduce it to passing adventurers! if there’s any quest you can think of, these guys can probably make it happen!
or you know, you could just keep it simple. stay here. trade. stay here. guard.
you could invent a new sort of race to fill this niche. you could make them oortian serving constructs that were left over from the ancient times, (but considerably friendlier than the protectors) or you could make them somewhat akin to Na’vi in Legend of Zelda (but considerably less annoying)
sooo, yeah. that’s my Idea. is it a good one?
