Of all the features not yet included but apparently still planned, passenger missions are easily my most anticipated new game mechanic. Reading the DDA thread
"Chewie here tells me you're lookin' for passage" Passengers in Elite: Dangerous really made clear to me that they have the right ideas and that once this profession would be implemented it would be the part I'd like to spent most of my playing time with - given it's implemented in the right way, incorporates all those ideas described in that thread and takes advantage of all the great plans and ideas FD still has in the drawer for Elite: Dangerous.
The way I see it there are two main ways passenger missions could be included in the game (and numerous shades of grey between those two extremes, of course):
Best case:
You are flying in your shiny Orca / Dolphin / whatever with a number of VIP guests in one of your luxury cabins. While supercruising to your far away destination in your current system, you leave the helm to your NPC co-pilot (=> NPC crews for hire) and pay your guests a visit (=> first person walking around your ship). At the cabin, you greet your guests, do some small talk with them and hear some interesting or funny stories (=> interactions and dialog options for NPCs). You then recognize one of the guests in the cabin (=> NPCs with faces) from a former encounter (=> NPC contacts). Since you already met him several times and helped him with various problems, he trusts you and confides some secret mission to you (=> NPC reputation / persistent NPCs)...
The possibilities for cool interaction with NPCs are pretty vast, IMHO. So, to really get the most out of passenger missions, we'd need to first see the introduction of a number of already planned game mechanics:
Worst case:
Passengers are just another kind of commodity, "loaded" and "unloaded" in
exactly the same way like current hauling missions, no interaction with your guests, no meeting them in their cabins, no faces or character models to relate to, no continuity. If we'd really get passenger missions with the currently available mechanics, that would be all we get. And to be honest, I'd rather have no passenger missions at all than such a dumbed down and uninteresting mechanic that doesn't really distinguish itself from the cargo hauling we already do.
The FD devs already have so many great ideas for enriching the representation of NPCs and for interacting with them. They just need to make sure those ideas are implemented before the mechanics that rely on them or heavily benefit from them, like passenger missions.
Given all these prerequisites for really interesting passenger game play I would urge FD to wait with the implementation of passenger missions until all or most of those mechanics that would really make it a rich and interesting experience are implemented. I don't want to see this potentially very interesting mechanic being shoe-horned upon the very limited representation of NPCs we have right now. I'd rather they take their time to introduce those individual aspects of interaction with NPCs in a proper way before jumping to the creation of lackluster passenger missions just to give the Dropship and the Orca more value right now.
Please, dear ED developers, take your time with passenger missions and do them right!
