Killing Backers as a way to farm early equipment and get some gold

[spellcastersuck]

Apparently, killing backers (the NPCs with yellow textbox) have no negative consequences, except when other legitimate NPCs are inside the line of sight. They grant some decent loot early on, and you get the pleasure of defiling the avatars of someone else. I personally think that all these colorful Marty Stus and Mary Sues are distracting and feel completely out of place, and until a mod that removes them appears, I will just pretend I am polishing the game through purges.

[Tigranes]

You can murder non-backer NPCs too, if you're not caught. 

[pi2repsion]

You can murder non-backer NPCs too, if you're not caught. 

Ah, but which will give him the most satisfaction?

[Fearabbit]

I really wanted to kill The Vulture. But he's right in the middle of the Goose and Duck, and I can't do anything about this bastard without starting a massacre.

 

BTW I had no idea those were backers. I just thought they were random flavor NPCs. I really liked reading those little character backgrounds so far!

[Voss]

They're actually 'un-flavor' NPCs.  

 

Visually, they undermine the setting, with hordes of godlike standing around with no one caring (especially in gilded vale, where the f'ed up inhabitants should be freaking out and forming lynch mobs).   

They're further confusing for players at the start of the game.  Are they relevant story pieces connected to your character suddenly seeing spirits and weirdness?  Oh.  No, no they aren't.  They're cardboard cutouts for bad prose, unrelated to the universe at all, often containing bad jokes. (Yay, for the elf beat up for accusing someone of bestiality!)

 

Farming the immersion breaking crap for loot is the best use I've come across for them.  But there should really be an option to disable them, as they're horrid and bad for the game experience. 

[Jazou]

Oh, thanks for the info Voss. 

 

I was reading all that stuff from former lives because I thought it's relevant for the later story.

[Viperswhip]

Apparently, killing backers (the NPCs with yellow textbox) have no negative consequences, except when other legitimate NPCs are inside the line of sight. They grant some decent loot early on, and you get the pleasure of defiling the avatars of someone else. I personally think that all these colorful Marty Stus and Mary Sues are distracting and feel completely out of place, and until a mod that removes them appears, I will just pretend I am polishing the game through purges.

So, you just want an empty world with no context and people in it? Still, it's a nice little tip.

[gray808]

 

 

 

I think the point is they have no context.  I, too, had no idea they were backer-related fluff, and wasted a ton of time reading all their stories. 

 

It didn't really add anything to the game, in fact it made it more confusing, and distracted from the actual plot.

 

--Gray

[Jayngo]

I don't make it a practice to kill NPC's, but knowing some of the Backers give loot is massive incentive.

 

So, theoretically, I can read their Soul and the neat story they have, then murder them, and possibly create a new story in the process....

 

Most excellent.

[Nomadmerc]

I have a different view on this myself as I like that there are backer npcs. 

[garr71]

I also didn't know they where backers and though it was part of the world and story, but i stopped reading them once i read in the beginning one that was very very badly written. 

 

I really don't mind them as i just simply not click yellow named npc. Al tho it makes me laugh how easily immersion is broken for some people

[Fearabbit]

They're actually 'un-flavor' NPCs.  

 

Visually, they undermine the setting, with hordes of godlike standing around with no one caring (especially in gilded vale, where the f'ed up inhabitants should be freaking out and forming lynch mobs).   

They're further confusing for players at the start of the game.  Are they relevant story pieces connected to your character suddenly seeing spirits and weirdness?  Oh.  No, no they aren't.  They're cardboard cutouts for bad prose, unrelated to the universe at all, often containing bad jokes. (Yay, for the elf beat up for accusing someone of bestiality!)

 

Farming the immersion breaking crap for loot is the best use I've come across for them.  But there should really be an option to disable them, as they're horrid and bad for the game experience. 

 

There aren't too many Godlike in Gilded Vale. It makes sense that there are hordes of strangers in Gilded Vale, because Lord Raedric made that offer of a free home and everything.

I really didn't think they were very distracting. And I thought it was pretty clear that they are just there for flavor.

 

And bad prose? I thought most of them were pretty excellent. Maybe a little bit cliché (which is probably because backers wanted some awesome background story) but well-written (because Obsidian). The only one I really disliked so far was The Vulture, like I said. I wish they'd have added a dialogue option "I know what you did" which would cause these NPCs to attack you if they did do something bad. (Maybe an idea for a mod.)

[termokanden]

Visually, they undermine the setting, with hordes of godlike standing around with no one caring (especially in gilded vale, where the f'ed up inhabitants should be freaking out and forming lynch mobs).   

They're further confusing for players at the start of the game.  Are they relevant story pieces connected to your character suddenly seeing spirits and weirdness?  Oh.  No, no they aren't.  They're cardboard cutouts for bad prose, unrelated to the universe at all, often containing bad jokes. (Yay, for the elf beat up for accusing someone of bestiality!)

I wouldn't say it's bad prose, but I will admit that they confused me at first. I thought they were supposed to be related to the story somehow, but I couldn't see how. Took me a while to figure out it was a backer thing. I don't mind them so much, but they are a bit too much for my tastes. They're everywhere!

[Peanuckle]

Well, a significant portion of 77,000 people earned that reward, so of course we're going to be inundated with yellow-name NPCs. I just consider them background and move on.

 

It would've been amazing if they were game-relevant (minor quest givers, dialogue with their stories, etc) but there's just too many to do that with. It'd be a whole game's worth of content.

[Viperswhip]

I guess my point is that the villages and cities in the game feel empty enough without killing off all the yellow named characters.

[M4xw0lf]

Apparently, killing backers (the NPCs with yellow textbox) have no negative consequences, except when other legitimate NPCs are inside the line of sight. They grant some decent loot early on, and you get the pleasure of defiling the avatars of someone else. I personally think that all these colorful Marty Stus and Mary Sues are distracting and feel completely out of place, and until a mod that removes them appears, I will just pretend I am polishing the game through purges.

I'll definitely keep that in mind. When I come across some guy with especially hideous memories next time, who knows... ^^

[Ceranai]

I really don't get the hate for them, is it because there are too many godlike? i mean it isnt like the game is too crowded to begin with. Having said that i might just try a little loot farming, how good is the loot though?

[Viperswhip]

I really don't get the hate for them, is it because there are too many godlike? i mean it isnt like the game is too crowded to begin with. Having said that i might just try a little loot farming, how good is the loot though?

Well, the good thing is you can generally tell from what they are wearing, do I'd only kill the ones in heavy armor, it sells for a lot.

[Hatred]

I really wanted to kill The Vulture. But he's right in the middle of the Goose and Duck, and I can't do anything about this bastard without starting a massacre.

 

BTW I had no idea those were backers. I just thought they were random flavor NPCs. I really liked reading those little character backgrounds so far!

 

Yeah I quicksaved when I found the vulture. Then I killed everyone in the bar >.> I almost just left it that way.

I personally feel like the writing for the backers isn't really that great. I was also a bit annoyed when I realised I had been reading each and every single one of these stories for no particular reason. A lot of them seem to be someone practicing writing characters you are supposed to find cool.

[Ink Blot]

Are they really more 'immersion breaking' than just going around slaughtering people in villages for nothing more than their loot? I figured out they were the backer NPCs fairly quickly and then just proceeded to ignore them.

 

You buggers. Of course, now that I know you can pretty much kill them with impunity, and since 'immersion' isn't something that's tenuous and fragile to me...

[Voss]

I guess my point is that the villages and cities in the game feel empty enough without killing off all the yellow named characters.

Gilded vale is supposed to feel empty: consider the settlement offer, the hanging tree, bandits in the countryside and the lack of healthy babies.  This is a place with serious negative population growth, one that started ~fifteen years ago and only got worse

 

Dyrwood as a whole spent an entire generation on a nasty war, then started Purging the population of anyone following the 'wrong' religion, and immediately started having problems having healthy children. People talk about this all the time, Durance will in fact brag about taking part in the Purges.  By the background history, this is a country facing really rough [GrimDark] times and a shrinking population is a major part of it.  

Edited March 31, 2015 by Voss

[pi2repsion]

Are they really more 'immersion breaking' than just going around slaughtering people in villages for nothing more than their loot? I figured out they were the backer NPCs fairly quickly and then just proceeded to ignore them.

 

You buggers. Of course, now that I know you can pretty much kill them with impunity, and since 'immersion' isn't something that's tenuous and fragile to me...

The main problem with them is that they break one of the fundamental conventions of CRPGs - that those people who are unimportant don't get names and that characters with names should be talked to if possible. In other words, that unimportant background characters whose main job is to be there such that a setting doesn't seem unpopulated are, at the same time, clearly distinguishable such that players don't waste time on interacting with them.

 

By giving them names, even if with a different backlight, you are indicating to players that these are important and should be talked to as. To make it worse, it requires your very special soul reading ability and plays a sound and graphic effect when you do it, you know, just like that very important event right at the start of the game. Players who don't start out knowing that it is a waste of time unless you want to read flavour stories that are irrelevant to the setting and to the game's story are going to spend a lot of time reading/skimming them and activating soul reading just in case this next one is the one that actually does something. Eventually they will eventually learn it, but even then it adds to the time it takes for a player to get a quick view of who are important in a given setting, because the mind is much better at automatically sorting people by whether they have generic names that appear all over the place, like four commoners next to each other, or unique names, than by sorting them by whether their names have one backlight or another.

 

It is a completely different issue with tombstones/testimonials. Those are normally used in CRPGs to list jokes, silly verse, RIPs, and real world references and not to provide useful information except in the cases where there's a specific mission to find some useful information on a tombstone, and they aren't spread out everywhere but collected in a few locations.

 

Fleshing out the game with named characters that are utterly irrelevant to the plot instead of just adding a bunch more generic people with professions rather than names was, as far as I am concerned, a bad idea where gameplay is concerned.

 

It helped rake in the money, though, so there is that. It just makes for an ever so slightly worse game.

Edited March 31, 2015 by pi2repsion

[Hellraiser789]

 

Are they really more 'immersion breaking' than just going around slaughtering people in villages for nothing more than their loot? I figured out they were the backer NPCs fairly quickly and then just proceeded to ignore them.

 

You buggers. Of course, now that I know you can pretty much kill them with impunity, and since 'immersion' isn't something that's tenuous and fragile to me...

The main problem with them is that they break one of the fundamental conventions of CRPGs - that those people who are unimportant don't get names and that characters with names should be talked to if possible. In other words, that unimportant background characters whose main job is to be there such that a setting doesn't seem unpopulated are, at the same time, clearly distinguishable such that players don't waste time on interacting with them.

 

By giving them names, even if with a different backlight, you are indicating to players that these are important and should be talked to as. To make it worse, it requires your very special soul reading ability and plays a sound and graphic effect when you do it, you know, just like that very important event right at the start of the game. Players who don't start out knowing that it is a waste of time unless you want to read flavour stories that are irrelevant to the setting and to the game's story are going to spend a lot of time reading/skimming them and activating soul reading just in case this next one is the one that actually does something. Eventually they will eventually learn it, but even then it adds to the time it takes for a player to get a quick view of who are important in a given setting, because the mind is much better at automatically sorting people by whether they have generic names that appear all over the place, like four commoners next to each other, or unique names, than by sorting them by whether their names have one backlight or another.

 

It is a completely different issue with tombstones/testimonials. Those are normally used in CRPGs to list jokes, silly verse, RIPs, and real world references and not to provide useful information except in the cases where there's a specific mission to find some useful information on a tombstone, and they aren't spread out everywhere but collected in a few locations.

 

Fleshing out the game with named characters that are utterly irrelevant to the plot instead of just adding a bunch more generic people with professions rather than names was, as far as I am concerned, a bad idea where gameplay is concerned.

 

It helped rake in the money, though, so there is that. It just makes for an ever so slightly worse game.

 

 

Gotta agree. Although I would've loved it if they pulled something like Lost Odyssey, Planescape Torment, and others where examining a person or item would start to tell I story and it would play out in a obviously way where you could tell it didn't advance the story and was just there to add lore and depth to the game (I think someone else mentioned this too). Of course, that would've have required a lot more work, but I think it would've been better. So either have them really spread out throughout the game appropriately (maybe come across 5 at a time, max) or just shove them all in one tavern or something (and make it quite obvious that its not important stuff) would be my solution. Cool also be kinda cool if they were just walking along the street, minding their own business doing their own thing, but then they'd need to be normal looking and rather plain so they don't stand out.

[Mungri]

Can they drop magic items?

[Lohi]

I wouldn't say it's bad prose,

 

I would.  Some is ok, a small number actually good, but so much just typical florid fan-fic prose.  Everything has to be described no matter how unimportant to the story.  I see this style propagated sometimes, as people copy form and style from each other on a fan board or in an MMO, etc.  Just count the number of adjectives in these stories, or times that some physical attribute of someone is described (usually with a metaphor).