Short little background: I wanted to make a voxel game some time ago but retired the project for other stuff, thought some of my ideas would maybe be appreciated.
Okay many games have factions, but this is something completely different.
A faction is a group of players and npc’s, the game does not make differences if a character is controlled by a player or not. Each member has a reputation inside it and possibly a role, npcs also have a loyalty value towards the faction.
Factions can freely define rules, roles, conditions to grow reputation and how roles are assigned.
A faction can have subfactions (and they again can have subfactions). The subfaction also has a loyality towards the mother faction wich will basically be a weighted average of the members loyality towards the mother faction.
Okay that were the technicalities, here come the applications ingame and how factions naturally grow.
I planned to start with a paleolithic family/clan/tribe group of just the player and a few npcs that are very loyal to their faction. The only role is the leader (player) but its easy to create new roles to make one npc oversee some others. Once you settle down and your settlement grows being the leader of all the npcs slowly gets harder. Subfactions form, and to keep a lot of npcs working like slaves for you you’ll need to make concessions like paying wages, or allowing silly things like them electing their mayors (or just force them to keep working if you have loyal warrior elite)
Okay so basically you slowly form a government over your village. Other players can join your faction (as equals or as vassals) so this doubles as a guild/clan system of other online games.
Factions also handle conflicts and diplomacy with other villages
Yeah the NPC System would go in that direction, heck singular NPCs could be angry at their neighbor NPC for being too loud all the time and have a grudge against that one Asshole that keeps them awake at night. XD
Any sort of Hierarchy System for NPCs and Players will need a lot of work though, so that is definitely a later Feature to implement.
But at the very least Teams for the purpose of avoiding Friendly Fire and such will exist early, with some Members having a “Founder” Rank/Designation in that early version of the System, enabling them to decide who joins and who leaves the Team.
One of the Main purposes of my Game is to make pretty much everything possible, as long as it stays a Voxel.
What’s the point of factions or setting ranks or so? Certainly you don’t want to go the game-immersion-breaking way of some arbitrary rank preventing someone from doing something for no reason in an area? Better to actually build defenses and so forth. ^.^
Well yeah I figured I needed teams of players and npc factions so why not join them together when they have a strong overlap?
I didn’t intend to gate any content behind arbitrary ranks (as players can easily define their own ranks) but rather use this as a mean to help players to selfgovern. It can’t prevent anarchy alone, because actions against the user defined laws do nothing but reduce a meaningless reputation value. But it allows players to at least track who is their friend and who is not. This allows random players that come along to participate in a group.
I imagined basically players being able to create their own political setup, do they want to elect their islands leader? Do they want to let people build anywhere or do they want to sell claims? Do they collect taxes in exchange for protection? All those things have to be enforced by the players themselves, but they obviously need some interface to define those rules (outside the game would break Immersion a lot more). The reputation is intended to be an all seeing eye so places don’t get lawless just because the owner is offline.
But yeah, obviously a feature for later, just wanted to mention it before it’s too late.
About your neighbourhood arguments: I designed a personality system with 201^5 different personalities so each npc reacts a bit different and less predictable. But that was basically mostly used for interpersonal conflicts and fitness for different tasks. Might be a different direction that what you plan, I intended to make a first person colony survival basically
Oh you can have permissions for things like money access in a bank sure, but as long as it’s not absolutely stupid stuff like ‘preventing building in this area for seemingly no in-game reason’.
Just build proper security instead. Turrets, force fields, rabid animals, whatever is appropriate, even in scenario’s, a pack of ravenous wild animals appearing and hunting a player down is a lot more ‘fun’ then just a message saying they can’t do that.
