I’m against doing that to your characters. I would rather just have a fancy border around the portrait for important characters, and not have the important ones all look like royalty, but the others like peasants.

What I mean is, you have some random royal character. He gets pretty royal portrait, but no fancy border, because he’s not an important character.
We have a peasant, and he gets scruffy portrait, but his border is shiny because he has an important quest.

I’d rather have a border or something else rather than unpolished portraits as well.
I do think it would also make it easier to identify, since some characters might not have all that fancy style anyway.

Though I can understand leaving the less important characters’ portraits unpolished will probably cut some time on development in general.

Btw, loved the animation, really funny, wasn’t expecting that ending haha.

Thanks for your comments! Your border idea sounds interesting and we’ll look into it. However, I think you’ve misunderstood what we meant! We will not make important characters look like royalty and everyone else like peasants, nor will the less important characters be less polished.

The changes we want to make is in details such as the main characters sporting colors that pop a bit more and let them feel more unique in terms of haircuts or clothing design, things that will not change their status in society.

Perhaps the Fae were a bad example to showcase this as the two main characters are also, in fact, very important to their society and therefore will look more ‘expensive’ as well, making the difference much more apparent than it would have been between two characters of the same class.

Hope this cleared it up, and please keep sharing your opinions :)

Thanks for clearing that up!

As an alternative to borders (or compliment to), how about a fancy nameplate on story characters? You could even extend this– have specially themed nameplates for different quest-lines!

Moin

I’m perfectly fine with a pool of 4-5 portraits for not so important characters. It would be ok for me if, say, the shopkeepers or guards would always look the same (only of the same race of course :>). I wouldn’t mind if characters who appear only 2-3x on my screen anyway wouldn’t have unique graphics.

I’d rather like to see a lot more different locations, like desert, swamp, jungle etc. ;).

Grüße,
regards,
the Toast

I think, it is the best way to use some character portraits for the less important characters.
It is impossible to give every creature a own image.
You are doing a great job! Keep it up! :)

Cost & Delay concerns aside, I for one would love to see equal visual importance/uniqueness/details in all characters, because:
1- It’s fine in terms of gameplay, the blue/yellow “!” being enough to indicate who you should go to for a main/side quest.
2- It’s good for immersion, as each character feels like a unique part of something important (Grindea), and might give you a quest in the future (good investment for future updates in that respect). I want to feel immersed in the whole game, not just the main storyline.

That said, such a feature can be costly.
In my experience game developers tend to cut costs in that area because:
a- It’s standard to have less polished filler NPCs, so although it hurts quality, it doesn’t hurt player satisfaction because we aren’t expecting any better.
b- It scales badly: the more content you produce, the heavier the cost of highly polished NPCs, since you have to be consistent in all areas of the game.
c- In the content department, it is often regarded as a lower priority compared to more quests / richer environments.

Finally, since the reason you mention behind these changes is to improve on your game and not to save time/money, I think it’s fine to keep all characters unique, for above reasons, provided that it is not detrimental to other, arguably more important, aspects of the game (quests, polished areas etc…).

Regards,

Yangna

Personally, I really don’t think it’s necessary to specify to players which NPCs are important. We’re generally smart enough to discover that on our own through the subtle nuances in gameplay. For example, NPC A’s dialogue hasn’t changed since I completed a major quest objective. He’s unimportant.

That said, I would go a non-dialogue route if I were to try and specify importance. I’d assume the main point of specifying who’s important and who isn’t would be so players don’t have to waste time talking to an NPC if the NPC won’t say anything important. Since you can’t see portraits without talking anyway, using those doesn’t really save much time.

Overall, I think the identification of questgivers via the speech bubble exclamation points, as it is now, is plenty. Only further step I would consider is adding a few other speech bubble things for important non-quest NPCs. I.e. vendor speech bubbles with a simple icon to ID them. But then you have to worry about breaking immersion, cluttering the screen, etc.