I offered the idea of procedurally generated unique narrative missions earlier in the thread - as I see that as the simplest, lowest cost solution for bringing "personal narrative" elements into the game. Simple and low-cost enough I could see FD actually implementing something like it. It's the "theme park" way of handing narrative to players. It would be consistent with the game's current theme park structure.
I don't necessarily think it's the right solution, though. I believe your character's journey in the game, his immediate surroundings and interactions with the various NPC's and factions in the world feel so sterile and uninteresting because there's no way to impart lasting change on anyone or anything. Everything is either A) static and uninteractable B) transient and temporary, created only for the one instance and personal bubble around the player, never to be seen again C) immediately bounce back to whatever state they were in before you interacted with them
The right way to solve it, in my mind, is two-fold - it needs to be because this is both an online multiplayer game and a solo game - you need more complex, persistent AI-controlled NPC's that move around in the galaxy just like players do and have their own motivations and agendas and with whom you could interact in various ways, including trade, diplomacy and combat - and which, importantly, also interact with each other in non-predetermined ways, so there's story that goes on even without the player interacting with it. They could have escape pods similar to players if you don't want every one of them murdered within 4 hours of the system being introduced to the online universe.
The other prong of this approach is giving players the means to form organizations, build and trade things and wage organized war against each other, however much some will cry that it will "turn Elite into Eve" or whatever bogeyman scenario it triggers in their mind. Those people, I can only conclude, are against having any sort of player-generated narrative.
If you want the creation of narrative to be the responsibility of the players you have to build the framework and mechanics that actually enable them to create that narrative. Make it more like an actual sandbox game, rather than the theme park it currently is.
Of course all this would be very expensive and complicated to implement so I'm not holding my breath for it. Of course, you could make it cheaper by only implementing one half of it - either NPC's or proper multiplayer narrative - but then you'd be favouring either the multiplayer experience over solo or vice versa.
