Follower Controls Needed

There's already plenty of posts relating or broadly complaining about the rough-edges nature of NPC and Followers in the game. I would normally aim to provide focused feedback but instead I wanted to opt into listing out concerns and ideas on a broader, and hopefully constructive spectrum.


To narrow down as best as possible, I'll mainly touch on the active recruit type of follower, starting with a brief list, then I'll try to break down each bullet point.

• Distance and personal space

• Item usage Over-Simplicity

• Lacking Context Awareness

Distance and Personal Space

Starting with this common note, followers tendencies to get in the way, roam around in circles, run aimlessly and stand directly in front of the player is at its best, rough, and at worst, makes more than just me want to quit out and take a break in frustration.

Standing in-front of a player who's aiming or interacting with something is not only common, but it's the expectation with their pathing. I've stabbed, shot, wasted spells, and, personally speaking; have tried to off my own follower despite knowing better.

Pushing past the frustrations and complaints, what do I believe would be good considerations for future patches? Starting off would be a simple behavior setting for follower distance, which could resolve a number of the above issues, though not perfectly. Something basic like 2, 5, 10 meter increment personal space options do feel like potentially simple implementations though.

Less broadly speaking, context awareness for when a player is doing something, aiming, fighting, mining, would more directly tackle any possibilities of the issue persisting.

Item Usage Over-Simplicity

Everyone I've played alongside in Nightingale have discovered the hard way that their followers were literally burning high tier resources in fire, putting them into crude building structures, and so on, by default. This sucks, and contributes to making followers feel like ignorant programs, ruining any sense of "person-hood" they might've vaguely had, and creating abrasion between players once again.

Starting off with suggestions, as you might've been able to tell, I try to be as constructive as possible in feedback. It's of my personal belief that upon getting or setting a follower, that they should either have those behaviors disabled as a default, so players get to be more conscious of what their NPCs do.

An alternative to this would be some basic follower setup upon acquisition or assignment. This could look as simple as the followers behavior window popping up first thing before you set them loose onto the world beside you.

Lastly, and this feels like something that will be a necessity in the future at some point if Nightingale explores NPCs and settlements even more, but an item whitelisting/blacklisting behavior option would be the most ideal fix, though the prior suggestions could certainly exist alongside it. For simplicity sake, this concept could just be tier based behavior options, instead of needing to program in individual indexing for the function, it could be as simple as a behavior setting toggling all item use interactions towards "Tier 0", "Tier 1", etc.

Lacking Context Awareness

Last but not least is this vague sounding topic. It touches on all of the above in a lot of ways but the main distinguishing factor that separates this issue is simply put... why would someone eagerly following a Realm walker not travel while treating the player as the leader? As it stands, followers behave no different than when we found them circling around idly performing the more basic of actions.

But players, realm walkers, should inherently introduce some level of implied guided competency, and I do not believe that the incompetency in followers is by design as much as it feels like a scope and priority issue. Either way, there are various contexts in which NPCs are actively harmful to a players playthrough due to this lack of awareness.

I've been killed by followers cutting down trees onto me, by followers corning me into a cave crevice in a desire to stand in front of me while I fight bears. Activating and aggro'ing Eotens by accident I know is part of the draw of a disguised tree based beast, but not giving followers the awareness of nearby boss level creatures aggro'ing from their actions has led at least myself to personally disable tree cutting abilities on almost every follower I bring with me, cause... well to put it bluntly, they're a danger.

It's my belief that the burden of mistakes and falling into traps should be, largely, player driven. A player could use all the caution in the world but still fall victim to an NPC's recklessness. It doesn't feel good, and creates very good reasons to not keep one around.

In Summary

I'm a huge fan of sandbox survival titles, and have been playing Nightingale roughly since launch on and off. I work adjacent to creative industries so I know how all this can come off, I've even touched base a bit with some of Digital Extremes talent partners via Linkedin a couple years back, which is only to say that I genuinely do enjoy this title and think it has tons of promise. At risk of going off topic of this very long thread I've written up, the crafting & material system is by far my favorite in any game, understandably a little rough around the edges, but that alongside the world, writing and "vibes", this is definitely one of my top survival sandboxes despite how popular the genre has been as of late.

The NPCs, as you've seen if you've read this (thank you if so), is something I just belief is a noteworthy enough rough edge on the game currently that I think its worth... well, writing all this for. The AI for various things in the game seem to suffer similar states, but they're just at their most noticeable and playthrough-affecting through the follower system.