From caveman to gentleman
Luís Silva Morais, João Dias, Pedro A. Santos · 2019
Even though modern video games present rich storytelling and high graphical fidelity, they are still lacking in rich non-scripted NPC social interactions. In this work we present an extension of the Comme il Faut (CiF) and CiF-CK social interaction models, where we added emotions and a emotion appraisal process based on the OCC model of emotion and also added a belief system that models the social network values that the NPCs expect regarding the other NPCs' relationships. A version of the new model, which we named Comme il Faut - Exiles (CiF-Ex), was implemented in the AAA game Conan Exiles using their modding tools and validated. The results were noteworthy: the users enjoyed the game more and tended to spend more time near CiF-Ex enabled NPCs. The majority of the users preferred CiF-Ex NPCs, versus the vanilla NPCs. CiF-Ex NPCs were perceived as more believable and less predictable.