Critters, beasts and a living world

[midnight solstice]

Hey there,

The world feels more alive and a fair bit denser than Ow1 but there's more that can be added.

The interactive scale of animals is somewhat there.

Aggressive - neffer etc
Passive - the fluff ball who's name I forgot
Coward - pearl birds on low health

Animals need to both hunt one another and be apathetic in zones like rivers.

A predator to hunt the neffer and pearl birds would make sense.

Also something like ducks that have nests hidden in the barley as a cowardice bird, say half the size of a pearl bird or less.

Smaller beasts that scamper from you.

Eg. Hunting a frog, toad or salamander to produce the alchemical needs for the explosives and traps.

We already have the pygmy goats but they need both predator and should instantly flee when spotting anything bigger than them outside of other grazing animals.

An interim creature between the phoenix and neffer would be a reasonable miniboss both in challenge and filling out the niches.
A pre apex predator.

This would also allow for hunting quests ala Monster Hunter.

"This beast is impeding travel/farmland etc. Hunt with discretion"

In the mind of a far future update

[urban jackal]

We agree that it doesn't happen often enough that wildlife and human enemies fight off each other. We're looking into how to increase their aggression towards each other without causing enemies to always be already dead when you find them.

With that being said, there's still some hard limitations to how much creatures are active at the same time in a zone for technical reasons. Currently Outward 2's performance are more CPU bound than GPU bound if I'm not mistaken (aside from the DX11 bug that affected a LOT of players)

[bronze burrow]

maybe scripted encounter events with triggers with requirements + chances tied to playtime total, time of day, progress and other variables?

[urban jackal]

LIke I said, we're looking at our options. It's the kind of system where you need to be just right, there isn't much maneuvering space before it gets too much or too little.