Eh..... You provide evidence but I do not reach the same conclusion. Multiple times they have said they are against NPC simply because they take strain the game further. Also the points you show(apart from the nids) doesn't necessarily mean that NPC will fight beside us and send us on little quests or heavily direct the game. I do expect maybe some overall orders coming from somewhere, whether computer or human generated.
Their goal is still to increase player pop as time goes by, as evident by the future mergers of territories into singular ones. NPCs still dont fit from a tech perspective, even with the new approach.
Faction Leaders, Tyranids and other items you presented were here from the start even before the founder program. And they said number of times NPCs are something like "Servitors" or decorative things. Faction Leaders are for narrative for world events and give the factions reason to be on Arkhona. They also said Faction Leaders will not be actual killable playable or active in combat or gameplay.
i agree and i should have expressed that more in my final thoughts. people thought eternal crusade was going to be planetside 2, but forgot that planetside 2 has a lot of limitations that wouldn't have worked to meet the vision of eternal crusade, for example tyranids, single server, and such. but there are things that nathan typed confused me on what his vision really is that gave me this impression and inspired me to write the post. borrowing from the quotes from my original post: what confuses me is what does the games he labels as "open world" have that planetside 2 doesn't. if it isn't NPCs, then is it something else? what am i missing?
Left 4 Dead Tyranids, then bigger and bigger battle zone things till it's all open world. Then add spaceships and planes and stuff to bomb ppl with =D
I think that's a good question. It does seem like npc's (with quests) seemed to be the primary difference between open world and not open world (besides scale). However, I don't think we're going to find out what the plan is until the state of the crusade.
According to Nathan, an "open world" is one single instance that is fully traversable from any point to another without loading screens. Planetside 2 is not "open world" because it is technically multiple instances linked together so that you can travel from one instance to another without loading screens, I.E. each of the 3 continents are an instance consisting of multiple instances linked together. The way Nathan described the functionality of Planetside 2 is how Pikko-server tech works, which is taking separately instanced locations of a virtual world and connecting them with an over/mega/omni/uni-server so that instead of having to load into a specific instance and then load into another, you transition from one to another seamlessly, without loading screens. Instead of trying to reach that pre-established ground level first and then working bigger, BE tried to jump the gun and go bigger, which blew up in their face causing them to need new funding, resulting in the current state of the game. The NPCs/quests had nothing to do with the 'open world'ness of the mentioned games.
isn't eternal crusade going to have a loading screen as the thunder hawk takes us between continents?
nathan concept of open world is about "a world" an open world need to be first of all a world a live world: planeside is not a world: it's only a series of outpost. so nathan want to put a world between the eternal crusade outpost and not a desolate wasteland. that don't mean quest and npc, but mean something to do in that world (tyranids that roam the world for example). a flat zone between two outpost is not an open world. a live continent full of stuff to do, place for ambush, tyranids caves, comm releay, promethium pipe to sabotage a destroyed city, a crashed ship full of tyranids etc etc that is an open world.
