...exist? Work? Not sure how best to word this, so let me explain:
So there are often NPC groups that have reputation you can earn/lose. NPC Factions, if you will. These are often tied to being able to come/go to cities/settlements, possible access to things like specialized crafting stations or recipes, quests, special equipment, and so on, and sometimes have opposed and allied factions (where you lose reputation with the opposed when you gain it with the one, or you gain reputation with factions allied to the one you're growing with)
Then there are playable race factions. PC Factions, if you will. These are generally connected to each Race's capital city, and sometimes sub-organizations or gropus (military or otherwise) within them, though there are sometimes cross-race factions, such as Class factions (like a circle of Druids that governs most Druidism in the world, or a faction dedicated to Cooking the world over). Sometimes, these are connected to PvP, but sometimes they're more PvE rivalries. Being friendly with a "good" city might make you unfriendly with a "bad" city or vise versa. Likewise, sometimes zones or objectives/key structures/areas of importance within zones can lean to one faction or another, and grant benefits to the controlling faction.
Quite a few games have dabbled in this, with some being relatively minor things (WoW's Hellfire Penensula giving slight buffs to factions as they control 1-3 of the capturable towers; FF11's zone "influence/control" being connected to cities and being influenced by players of a given home city doing quests and killing enemies in the zone) with some being more significant than others.
So I'm kind of curious, at a base level, do we have factions in the game for players (PC factions), and how does that affect players?
E.g. if there are three overall factions (Elves/Humans/Halflings, Dwarves/Archai/Gnomes, Dark Myr/Skar/Orge), does this impart any particular faction at creation? Does that limit what you can do with players of other factions? Can you potentially chnge faction (e.g. through quests and deeds)? Will being friendly with one faction potentially cause you trouble in another (e.g. a Dwarf being friendly with Thronefast having hostile reaction when entering the Skar capital city)? And might it be possible to do side-things to grind rep with those unfriendly factions to make them at least "neutral"?
I know, lots of questions for something in pre-alpha. I'm just curious if there's any thought about this or what it might do if put into play in some ways. Beside PvP. Everyone goes Horde v Alliance, but I'm not talking about that. :)
There are absolutely factions but as far as fixed faction groupings like the example given of Elves/Human/Halfling I don't believe so.
Each player race is their own thing with varying base reputation with each other race. They are not lumped together in groups by nature or anything else (Good, Neutral, Evil etc). It's entirely possible they might do something like that for a special rule PvP server or something though.
Some clips for you to watch:
https://youtu.be/6DiyWMGlT58?t=1440 Faction and consequences of choices in NPC interactions and perception
https://youtu.be/eq6ftMk21FA?t=6288 Factions in chat window
https://youtu.be/c-VljOeRfis?t=3169 Factions and Moral Alignment
https://youtu.be/gK3HJTSZG6c?t=1822 Races starting Factions
https://youtu.be/LrSnKMjZupA?t=2324 Factions will be in Alpha
https://youtu.be/cxTAqcQ2K3Y?t=1176 More Factions in chat window
https://youtu.be/cxTAqcQ2K3Y?t=1603 NPC vs NPC due to Faction differences.
https://youtu.be/cxTAqcQ2K3Y?t=2633 Faction ties (ie Factions effect other factions)
https://youtu.be/J24qkCOmnQY?t=542 Faction not just for Hostile-KOS vs Non-KOS
https://youtu.be/1tOd9N6XZZ0?t=2526 UI option/toggle to attack Factions you are friendly with.
https://youtu.be/EWQOzyWdU6I?t=2868 More about Offensive vs Defensive targets and Factions.
https://youtu.be/DT6PVU95H48?t=1853 Faction wars: NPC groups in pitched battles with other NPC groups.
https://youtu.be/U0uPswhN4to?t=930 Faction Matrix
From: https://www.firesofheaven.org/threads/pantheon-ama-responses.10091/
Will factions have an impact on game play, ala factions in Everquest deciding where you can visit and shop or will it basically be optional and fluff like WoW?
Chris (Joppa): Yes. Factions will govern whether you are welcome throughout the various civilizations and settlements in Terminus, and the degree of how welcome or unwelcome you are. Faction will contribute to dialogue options within Perception’s storylines, vendor pricing and haggling and a few additional surprises.
I would say there are 9 initial factions, one for each race.
The purist in me would like to see the player having to build faction for their own people, and depending on the people there could be a sub-faction among them outside of guild masters, and merchants/townsfolk. If the player encounters another race, they would have to build faction there if they wanted to and so on. I would also like to see obscure factions and eyeball-bleeding rare factions. All that allow access and the obscure/rare ones leading to certain things like abilities, recipes, quest weapons, clickies, etc. Also, suprise grey area faction interaction where a balance is better to maintain than all out one way or the other, Fallout3 had a good quest like this with vampires. IIRC if you resolved it a certain way, you bartered a tennuous boundary and the vampires gave you the ability to heal up and lose rads from human blood packets in hospitals and the people wouldn't shoot you.
Plus I would like to be aware of ways to improve low faction provided they are not a time-sink if possible.
There will be factions in the game. Character race and class choice will play a role in the faction dynamic. To provide an example from a previous stream, Direlords don't seem to be welcomed by certain members outside of Thronfast. VR wants player choice to matter. Certain races, classes, or race class combinations may have initial limitations in certain areas with certain factions. However, on the other hand, there could also be unique opportunities present.
There will also be various NPC factions. I assume some of these will be discovered through questing and progressing in the perception system. The recent stream showed some being discovered in combat. I believe that the town outside of Thronefast was also shown to have multiple factions in a previous stream.
I don't think an exact number of factions has ever been mentioned. I assume that each continent will have factions that are unique to that specific continent. There also might be some cross-over factions that are present on multiple continents.
There will be actions that can increase or decrease your faction with specific groups. You might have to trade one faction for another or find the best way to work on a specific rep without damaging other factions too much, but that will be part of experiencing the game.
