Animal Companions

[Paladin]

Anyone given any thought to having an animal companion available for players? Maybe limit it to the player being required to have a skill in handling / training the desired type of animal. Then you would have to find one young enough to be trained with a limit on the number of animals a player could have. Maybe even track how many such animals were in play and how many young of that type were in the game at any one time. (Wouldn't want everyone running around with their own personal wolf pack.)

Just thought it might be original enough to interest some people. Don't know how hard this would be to implement.

Could even put in a Cookie Monster for Ubik :P

[Ruadin]

I think animal companions are great and would hope they can be added into the game. There a number of things that pertaining to animal companions that would add alot of depth and strategy.

Some thoughts about animal companions;

- they could be used as pack mules
- they could be used as mounts
- they could be used for unique abilities
ex. a creature that could swim and take you across rivers and lakes
- they should reflect the environment of the summoner
ex. I would expect a wood elf ranger/druid type to summon/befriend wolves & bears etc. On the other hand a drow elf would probably summon a giant spider or a yochlol at very high levels. Apply special abilities to such a combination... such as a spider being able to WEB things that you fight allowing easier killing and you have an element of strategy added to that.

I hope other people will add to this and I'd like to see the developers opinions as well. Is this sort of thing difficult to implement?

[UBIK]

hehehehe i like that idea

[Wrentia]

I can see some problems with animal companions.

1. Mounts are a nice idea for travel but i think mounts should either be very rare and expensive or not in the game at all. Travel can be handled by teleports/boats/ and some sort of carriage system if needed. What would you do with your mount when entering a cold dank doungeon down a narror twisty set of stairs? Oh yea, tie it up outside, that bear nearby needs another meal.

2. Pack animals are truly designed to carry luxuries. Tent's, sleeping rolls, and the like. An adventurer should
be able to carry all he needs in his backpack for a week or more. I don't think we need pack animals either.

3. What unique abilities would an animal have that can't be done through magic?

-------------

Now summoned pets are a different matter. I don't know how the developers feel, but I can see summoning a creature to fight at my side. Woodsy druid type being only able to summon outdoors....Necro's of course can summon up an undead (interesting though about that undead race idea....if a member of that race is nearby when a necro summons a pet, would a member of the undead race be subject to that spell?)

However, I think there should be some kind of undestanding about pets....they will fight for you, but not neccessarily die for you. So, they may turn and flee or stop fighting....the monster being fought should also stop fighting the summoned beast at that point and turn its attention to the caster.

-Wrentia

[Slitherrr]

Pets are a great idea... Not necessarily summoned ones either, I think it'd be great to run around with a hedgehog I happened to pick up in the wilderness as a baby and trained, and not even necessarily for the combat value. After all, we always read about the faithful companions of heroes in books (Guenhyvar for Drizzt, that horse for Gandalf that I can't remember the name of, and the ever-present witches' black cat).

[Cynycal]

i'd like to have a pet bird and he'd warn me of danger when he was flying around..etc..im sure that would be hard to do

[Lordosis]

Needless to say, non-combat pets would be something that would be put in after we were done with most of the rest of Arcanity. Problem is, they are going to eat up system resources and network bandwidth just like any other creature. Although if they don't have an affect on combat, we might be able to cut back on their network bandwidth. But still that would be something we'd do for fun after release.

I would love to have mounts, just becuase no one has done it yet in an online 3D game that I've seen. I think our character animation system is up to the task, but again we have more pressing issues to deal with right now. But this is another "for fun, after release" sort of thing. I know we have a lot of those, but we honestly will keep working after release. The servers are going to be in our office, we're going to own them, so we can do whatever we want after release.

[Slitherrr]

Score another one for the Arcanity guys! Owning your own servers is a good thing.

[Cynycal]

i gotcha, but i'm telling you it'd be great to have non-combat pets

[Slitherrr]

Non-combat pets would certainly be nice, if it'd be possible, but it's less important than, say, balancing the death system, so all's good.

[KirosBlade]

Any sort of pet would be nice i think, because i am a big loser and what not, so i get lonely, and it wouldbe nice jes to sit and talk 2 my dog/cat/magical space slug demon for hours upon hours of time...ahhh...

[Wrentia]

Fire Lizards from the Dragon Riders of Pern series. That would be cool. Instead of a some kind of elemental pet, I'd like to see more of a familiar type system. Thoughts?

-Wrentia

[toray]

Eewwww...

I'm sorry. I hated familiars and animal companions in D&D, and I dislike the concept of them here.

But each to his own.. if they fit in the world-lore, then I don't mind people having them - certainly gives me an easy way to disable an opponent.. kill his familiar, and watch him lose a chunk of his ability to defend himself from me...

[Kymeri mac An Iolar]

Pets are great and add another aspect to the game. I understand that as far a programming goes this is not a easy thing to do. In UO you could be a animal tamer, it took a lot of practice/taming to be able to tame anything good. But boy was it fun to tame your own horse or to become a horsetrader. The big payoff for the work was the day you became a grandmaster tamer and got the dragon/nightmare/daemon. Also your pets could fight by your side.

[BelDragos]

What if a mage turned a companion into a creature? Would the player have control of his character or would they become npc monsters?

[Slitherrr]

Ok, think about that for a moment... How much do you think it would suck to work on a character, then suddenly have some guy come up, turn your character into a dog, and thus nullify your ability to play with that character? No, they would not turn into NPC's, one does not have the kind of freedom in an MMORPG that one has in a table-top game.

[Kymeri mac An Iolar]

Aye, that diffently would suck.

[BelDragos]

Sorry. I had to ask inorder to get rid of that idea from being used. That's sonething the undead might try to get away with.
A pet scorpian, spider, or other venomous creature might be a last defence if you could control them but it would be bad if someone else took control.

OUCH!!

[fredrick]

I love the idea of pets... it makes the game more 3-Dimensional I think.

It would be awsome if there would be a large variety of pets, and I think they could be implimented as follows:

Each pet has a certain attribute which is useful to the owner. (Or not.. let's face it, what good is a bunny except when you're really hungry?)

A bird will likely sqwak if there's anything predatory around.

A hawk can be trained to catch you food if you've trained it well. You could also probably train it to attack your enemy, but there's a good chance it would die in doing so.

A dog could catch you food, attack your enemy, warn you of strangers, and guard you. (particularly nice for spell casters)

A horse can be ridden.

The list is obvious, and large. I think the way to make them manageable from a programming aspect follows:

first, we can't have John Doe running around with his zoo of 3000 pets.. so a couple things have to happen.
1) pets don't like being neglected. If you don't talk to them, pet them and feed them, they run away. If the pets particularly nasty (say a lion) and you don't feed it and pay attention to it, it becomes delinquent and attacks you. (Particularly if you have it fight stuff often)
2) When pets reach maturity there hormones kick in, and they're going to start acting unpredictably as well as leave you seeking a mate. (See wild animals in circuses as an example)
3) Unless you train them real well, some pets just don't get along. Your bird doesn't like your cat, your cat doesn't like your dog, and your bird, cat, dog and horse DON'T like your lion! When you first aquire a pet that scares your pet, you have to spend a lot of time with both so one doesn't kill the other. Then if you have a lion as a pet, chances are your going to have a REAL hard time coaxing that bird to join up.

So, that leaves the issue of traffic/load. My suggestion for handling this would be to not really have the pet be it's own entity. Stick a flag on the player for each pet he has ID'ing the pet. The pet then works as any other skill, and the FE handles the graphics/sounds. (so while players see a lion attacking, the server just perceives it as another one of his attacks with a different weapon)

Also, it would be cool if caster types have the ability to make a pet a familiar. Maybe a caster can go into a meditative trance, and depending on his skill at working with familiars
A) send commands to his familiar
B) see/hear through his familiar
C) take over the body of his familiar
D) escape into his familiar's body before death
E) cast spells through his familiar

If the casters familiar skill is high enough, he can send telepathic commands to it without meditating. (Because you can't see what you're doing from a game interface if you're seeing through your familiar's eyes, of course the rest you have to meditate for.)

Anyway, just my 2 cents :)

[BelDragos]

You must take into account the feeding of your pet. If you don't feed it often enough it should leave. If your pet can support itself, why should it stick arround?

[Slitherrr]

...he did mention feeding, care, etc. Great suggestions Fred, very in-depth and well thought-out.

[Kymeri mac An Iolar]

Aye, nicely thought out Fredrick. UO had a pet system. You choose the skill taming and start out taming the little animals like cats, dogs, etc... Then you move up to bigger animals as your skill increases horses, ostards. That was great fun taming my own mounts. The way the system worked is once tamed they needed to be fed well to stay tamed, giving them some praise helped too. The better fed they were the better they followed commands. They could fight with you, some were pack horses for miners, you could give or sell them to other players. As long as they kept them fed they would remain tame.

[BelDragos]

Sounds like that would be very interesting. I could start a breeding program and breed the best mounts in the game. Employ the best tamers and make a killing in the market.

[Kymeri mac An Iolar]

If they have breeding in the game, yes you could. UO didn't have that feature.

[BelDragos]

Bummer!

[Dyson]

UO wasn't that great when it came to animals anyway. I'd like to see a "permanent pet" system here, where if you feed and train an animal long enough, it becomes yours.

[Kymeri mac An Iolar]

Yes, that would be nice, but even a pet you own for a long period will turn on you if you mistreat it or forget to feed it.

[Dyson]

Well, that goes without saying, of course. I have a few pets in real life... no way they'd be hanging around if there wasn't a steady supply of food.

[BelDragos]

Or affection.

[Verin'Ilhan]

I loved having pets in UO, but it got out of hand. Standing in town, someone walks in with 10 dragons. BTW i have a bunch on ls and ch if anyone needs one. :) It really should have been limited to one pet at a time. Ever see anyone walking around with 10 grizzlies? Mounts are fun too, but stabling them can be a pain for the team unless the limit of one is in affect.