I war watching E3 and was floored by the innovative nature of Watch Dogs Legion’s ambitious gameplay system of making any npc recruitable, and I immediately thought back to Shadow of Mordor (and Shadow of War)'s Nemesis system. The wheels began to turn within my mind. I would love to include something like this within my hack, which I have proclaimed will already have some mechanism of winning over and improving npcs.
How to do this? Well, let’s break down what could be required to make Watch Dogs Legion work, what likely went into making the Nemesis system work, and how it can be distilled into irreducible mechanics. It may also be beneficial to look at Assassin’s Creed Brootherhood and Revelation’s foundational work on this sort of system.
Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood: Apprentices
The Apprentice system has a fairly straight forward progress: 1) rescue citizen from being harassed, 2) inducted the citizen into the order, 3) send them on missions or have them accompany you on your own mission until they have leveled up to “mastery”. They can be killed, but generally don’t have much of an arc outside of their utility.
The Nemesis System
The Nemesis system was an ingenious system that looked at a region pyramidal hierarchy. There would be a top tier npc who would control a region’s center of power, and each successive tier would include a power of two more minions. Lower tier minions could be body guards of higher tier minions or even the regional chieftain, which would not prevent them from an endless game of back-stabbing and power-plays that were programmed into this system to keep the look of the roster fresh. You could even assign one of these minions the role of your body guard, which they could either faithfully uphold or betray you in your moments of need. There were also emergent stories built from the interactions of these minions with each other and the main character.
In addition to this hierarchy system, each “minion” npc had a class, vulnerabilities, invulnerabilities, relationships, and weapon sets. Actions could cause them to become loyal, disloyal, or cause comical series of scripted stories (try to convert them too many times and they’ll go insane, decapitated orcs could come back with their heads sewn back on, etc).
Watch Dogs Legion: Recruits
Unlike the nemesis system, there’s no outward indication that the commander of a power center or group can be flipped or that their lieutenants can be flipped, but every citizen has their own set of elements like the orcs in the nemesis system, permadeath is enforced, and unlike the prior two systems these npcs make up the faces (for lack of a better term) that the player can wear.
Each legionnaire will have several non-mechanical elements (such as a look, clothing, and voice set), and a set of mechanical elements (class, upgrades, weapons, and background related bonuses). A Legionnaire has a name/alias, a “stand-out” criminal/deviant activity, bonus “inherent” trait(s) that either supports a team or themselves, occupation, a list of relationships with other npcs, an opinion of dedsec that can be improved by solving problems for them or degraded by making their lives worse, a class with upgrades/special abilities, and weapons.