Horizons New Mission Type: NPC Cooperative Attack/Defense

[VR CMDR Novindus]

As an individual, crew, or wing, there should be missions where you co-operate with NPC ships to complete a particular task, such as:

• Destroy a particular target or targets.
  This could be a particular NPC ship for a high bounty.
  It could be a bunch of drones or other type of small units.
  
• Sabotage a space station, satellite, or ground building whilst avoiding defense units.
  
• Await a passenger ship to jump out of hyperspace then escort it safely to its destination, jumping out of supercruise to fight any interdictors.
  
• Protect a mining ship or fleet until X amount of resources are mined.
  
• Draw fire to allow a smuggler into a station, and survive.
  
• Pirating gigs to loot a particular ship on a known run, with bonus points for not destroying it.
  The ability to steal data would be great for espionage missions.
  
• Extraction of SRV unit containing data or items from a hostile area.
  
• Spying mission. Get into area X undetected, use tech to listen in on comms, get out safely to report.

All of the above could play into PowerPlay, where there are critical or high value targets or missions that have a greater effect on status of the Power this cycle.
Some of these could chain into other missions, so if you're successful in stealing data, it will lead to knowing where a key member of an opposing Power will be at what time, which will generate an NPC co-op mission to loot them, which if successful will generate an NPC co-op mission to assist in smuggling the looted item(s) somewhere.
If it's too messy to have this affect the Power's status, then it should at least have a much greater effect on your ranking with the Power than the grind missions, and is much more interesting.

The NPCs should have their own distinct character with good voice acting and a large varied pool of recordings so it doesn't get too repetitive listening in.
For each co-op mission, there should be selectable roles such as Attack Leader, Defender, Interference, Decoy, etc.
This will mean you're able to take on a different role for the same mission type each time.

If you're imagining a "Red leader this is Gold leader" type of scenario, you've got the picture.
It would be nice if some of it is cut-scene or cinematically choreographed where appropriate (but skipable on repetition if it's more than a few seconds).

I think there's a lot of potential here. It's like having a story without having a story.

 

[GenErick64]

I'm not opposed to this but i do think it would take a lot of work. I think this may deserve it's own expansion, especially if you're talking voice acting.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

what you list above is either stuff already in the earlier games in the series OR the kind of stuff one expects with all flight sim / space / combat games and i totally agree it should be in there... indeed it WAS in there in the promotional material FD sold the game on (remember the cap ship defense video).

Inittially i was certain this stuff was coming sooner rather than later... now i just *hope* it comes... a lot of work? perhaps but that does not mean it should not have been included early doors (far more important to the game than CQC imo, or even dare i say, PP or engineers... and as it was in the early promotional bumpf with no hint of it being paid extra content, then i would fully expect it to be part of the core game (even tho it would not directly affect me either way due to LTP)

the 1 thing which i could take or leave would be the voiced npcs. it would be nice and all, however with all the languages and not wanting it to become samy it would be a lot of work... that said, 1 thing i would say, so long as what they said on the script was also offered in text in the localised language, 1 thing which could reduce the work and increase the variety would be for all players to hear all languages IF there were voiced npcs.....

even tho i would not always undertand it, so long as my universal text translator gave it me in english, having a spanish / italian / french etc etc pirate talking to me in their native tongue would be fine imo.