DD Online was incorrect on my part, I meant NWN Online. Do you know what a round based game is? In all of the games I mentioned, your NPC's can and do function independently of you, they don't just stand their waiting for you to issue a command, although saying that, you can override their default behaviour by queing actions for them in some cases (or change their default behaviour, to a limited extent).
I'm not sure what the roles would be but the fact is that the AI script is already in the game, ie NPC's. They seem to be able to do everything we as pilots can do in our ships already.
I do understand what round based games are, and that's exactly my point, NPC teammates in those work because you can jump into them and control them if you want because you have the TIME to do that thanks to the round based nature of the game. Real time games, you don't have that time, while you are trying to control the NPC, your character is left hanging. There have been attempts at having NPC teammates in real time games, they put your character on autopilot when you control the NPCs, and that leads to bad things, it's not effective, it leads to player death, players don't tend to like that for some odd reason.
It's been stated that FD plans on having a ship with multiple players in it being as effective as multiple ships, and most people assume that means some sort of buff, space magic it's been called, so that the ship is now tougher, more agile and hits harder due to the number of real players in the ship.
Thing is, there's no reason to do that, you can achieve the same results without buffing the ship at all, you simply give the players better control over the things they use. Pilot, when not having to also watch the pips, sensors and everything at once, can concentrate more on flying and positioning, which makes the ship more effective without buffing it at all. Weapons Officer, by giving them dedicated weapon controls, they can target better because that's all they do, and turrets wouldn't be under the control of the ship's computer, so chaff wouldn't bother aiming, still mess with sensors, but not aiming. Engineering, better control of the energy flow, able to shut off systems not needed in combat, swap between different systems that are needed in combat but situationally, as well as actively repairing systems that take damage while in combat. Sensors, able to keep track of multiple targets at once(WO only sees what they lock on however) so they can track what's around the ship, also able to track/target Silent Running ships at longer ranges, defeat chaff and ECM, and generally make everything around the ship easier to see.
When these things are all done by individuals instead of a single person, the ship becomes more effective without a single buff being needed. Communication will be the keystone that ties them all together to get that effectiveness, as if you aren't communicating, no one knows what's going on and can't properly do what needs to be done. Pilot needs more speed, says nothing, Engineer doesn't know to put more power to the engines, and so on. These are things that people who've done multicrew in other games are aware of, it's amazing how much more effective a single vehicle becomes when multiple people operate it together as opposed to a single person doing it alone, just having those players communicating allows them to make more use of the vehicle's abilities, simple as that. It's not a new thing for online games, it's been done before and it's always been more effective for a crew to run the multicrew vehicles than a single player, even though a single player can run everything. One player splitting their attention between multiple things at once is less effective than multiple players each concentrating on a single thing while working together.
The AI in Elite Dangerous is not good, they don't do what we do in our ships right now, they don't even get close to it, they do 1 thing at a time and they do that badly in most cases. They suffer no heat issues, they suffer no ammo issues, they don't redirect power or repair their vessels, hell they can't pilot for jack either. You want THAT AI being in charge of systems on your ship that it isn't scripted to deal with at all? 'I need more power to the shields Jerry' "I'm going to boil you up, I'm going to boil you up *spinning in his chair*"...yeah, that'll go over great won't it?
Fact is, most of the people who only want NPCs play solo, they'll get nothing out of an NPC crew, since they won't be effective at what the player can already do solo, they aren't as effective as a player currently, so what exactly will they offer? Conversation? Taking up seats? Giving extra controls to players is one thing, humans can do things no scripting can, but the NPCs won't actually make any use of them, they are after all part of the game code anyway, they don't need extra screens and controls. And we've already seen how good the NPC scripting is for..well..everything and anything, it's not.
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
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