Missions: make them more personal with little touches

[Rubbernuke]

I'll be out with it: missions are very formulaic and impersonal. I get that you can't have 100 variations each time but the current missions offered have no soul.

But fixing them is not hard-

First:

VARIETY IN RESPONSES! There needs to be much more variety, seeing the same 3 responses is really jarring. It cheapens the experience when 3 10 word text strings could be extended into 10.

Branching missions:

When someone is sent to kill you, don't use the generic 'tasty cargo' NPC pirate. Its cookie cutter and poor. Instead, use the name of the opposing factions avatar in station- example: "Councillor Drang sends his best" as the bounty hunter interdicts you- and that you get a message cursing you when you win the inderdiction battle.

When you are offered to swap allegiances in mission by the opposition, if you decline you should get a nasty reply and a rep drop. Rather than press cancel and thats it, you should have a message like "What a pity I could not change your mind, now you must die" triggering an NPC bounty hunter to track you. Or not (depending on rep).

If you are offered the chance to change legal destinations (take y to station z rather than station x) and you decline, you need a snotty message just as you do with time failures.

If you have a passenger mission and you are offered to sell them into slavery, the passengers should give you a message to tug at those heart strings- "Why are you doing this?" sort of stuff.

Pirate Lord assassinations: if you are winning against them they could offer you cargo to live, or send you a destination for loot 'to look the other way' and not fight them. "You look the smart type. I can make it worth your while to forget about me". You lose rep (and perhaps your notoriety increases?) but you have a nice map to a data locker with 8 CIF in it.

Venerable generals: why did you change your mind? Tell me in SC, offer me a chance to join you (but at a massive rep cost to the opposing faction who asked you to kill them). NPCs say "I wised up"- well why? Why should I not kill you? Give me a counter mission and use that to branch off a whole new direction.

I could go on and on with small changes that *should* be easy to do (all message based using the same mechanics seen currently) that would add a lot more character. Generic A to B missions are fine, just please make them personal to the commander (and fit the context), and make that occasional mission special and memorable.

 

[Bobio]

A nice suggestion, and as you say, seemingly within the bounds of current implementation.

It'd be cool to see more variety in the local NPC chat in general. But yes, take it a step further and make missions feel more interactive/personal by adding these little touches.

In fact, having branching objectives or optional requests that are actually worthwhile would contribute a great deal already.
E.g. I take a passenger on a 1 million ls cruise across a system, only for them to "change their mind" just before our destination, offering me a measly 33,000 Credits on top of the 3,000,000 base reward...
Everyone just ignores these optional quests, but providing some incentive to do them (outside of more reasonable rewards) would do wonders.

 

[Rubbernuke]

At times all we need are extra messages from faction head NPC avatars- when we lose rep with them, they should personally berate you, and if you drop too much they might get fed up and send a bounty hunter to kill you (for costing them their job / standing in the court) sort of thing. Its very lightweight interaction but at least its beyond what we have now where these faces do nothing outside the boards.