With two high-profile releases employing dogs as an NPC (I speak of Fallout 3 and Fable 2), it perhaps is time to discuss the dog in gaming.

Let's start by discussing if the Fable 2 dog or Dogmeat won your heart the most, and then perhaps we should branch out into discussion of dogs in gaming down the years. Finally, let's discuss what makes a good ol' faithful mutt in gaming.

What are the key ingredients in forming a bond with your intangible collie?

DISCUSS

Why does there have to be a dog? I want a bear!

My friend made Dogmeat drink radiated water in Fallout so I don't think he liked him much...

smallharmlesskitten:
Why does there have to be a dog? I want a bear!

A red alert 3 style bear which is armor laded! Not some tiny, killable dog but a huge bear. Dogmeat wasn't that great in Fallout 3. He just used up my supplies to I sent him to go find food in a land mine field, oh the joy of it all.

Three play-throughs and I haven't found Dogmeat yet either. Apparently he's a belligerent bastard though, so as a natural sneaker I'll vote for Fable's more pacific nameless mutt.

Never found Dogmeat either, so I guess I'll give the shiny human bone to my Fable 2 doggie. Considering the AI for the latter was better; the dog had more functionality implemented to make it feel and act like a real companion doggie, it does deserve such a praise.

Dogmeat and I have a conflicting history. Some runs he's great, others he can't attack a butterfly without killing himself.

My pet dog (or cat) in nethack is immensely useful when it steals from shops or kills enemies while I'm too low level to survive.

On the topic of any friendly NPC I'm a bit torn - some games they're great and really useful (the pet for example) other games they're completely useless (the dog, the way your friendlies don't manage to kill anybody in MoH) so I think it's a bit relative to the programming behind the NPC.

I find this to be a really cheap gimmik, don`t really care much about it.

The robot dog in Half Life 2 was the best gimmik of this nature that I can remember because he was useful in his own AI retarded way.

meatloaf231:
Considering I never found Dogmeat in Fallout, I suppose I'm forced over to the side of Fable's dog.

is dogmeat the name of your dog?

I really don't know if developers should try to make an animal your companion in the game. However, they should keep the animals in the game, and for RPG types, the animals should be able to form a liking to the player, so long as the player lays down food for a while. It's hard to explain... Like, there should be no official "pet" creatures. Just creatures that will occasionally follow the player around.

This way, players can form their own attachments to the world, instead of having to follow the preset ones in the game, which they may not be compatible with. For instance, I remember a friend of mine forming a sort of friendship with one of the turrets in one of the HL2 games. The one where you get the turrets decoded and they fight for you, and you have to arrange them. He wound up taking a liking to one of them, and carried it through that entire section of the game. If games can stop making official companionships, and try to increase the numbers of situations where animals and characters have a potential for meaningful interaction, this new aspect of gaming would be enhanced greatly.

That's what I think at least.

Ah, I remember Dogmeat from the original Fallout. Just one lizard on a stick was all it took to have somebody who can nom a Super Mutant to death by making it constantly fall over. Poor guy met his end at one of their miniguns, so in a chem-fuelled frenzy I slaughtered the entire base.