One major thing that the game has always felt like it was missing was a way to communicate with NPCs. It's an obvious thought that has likely been mentioned many times, but I feel it's an important one to bring life and variety and more immersion to the game.
I love Elite: Dangerous, which has led me to watch videos of the previous Elite games (I don't know how I never played them, I would've loved them back in the day). And then in Frontier, I see exactly what I'm hoping for-- dialogue trees, and I assume they were procedurally done (if I have the terms wrong, hopefully ya at least get what I mean). You could demand cargo, pretend to be injured, try to trick someone, etc etc. Sometimes it'd work, sometimes it wouldn't, and either way it creates a story and memory all on its own.
The devs are great at RNG and producing content procedurally, and I am positive they could do a great job with dialogue trees. Each NPC would have a "personality" determined by their faction, career, allegiance, hidden factors, etc, and the exact specifics and range of nuance created with RNG. The player has set messages they can send, such as the normal pirate ones, or try to befriend them, small talk, ask for any POI in the area, if they've seen a CMDR recently, if they're a cop you can try to bribe them (as in Frontier), some cops are corrupt and some NPCs try to give ya a sob story to trick ya, you can try to pull rank if ya outrank them with a Superpower, allied faction members are more friendly, and so on.
NPCs could ask for help as they realize they're about to be interdicted, or other in-world situations... stuff similar to Red Dead Redemption where ya organically come across situations where you can help or make things worse.
Countless things could be done with it, and I wouldn't expect voice acting or anything aside from branching dialogue trees that can go in a lotta different directions depending on the situation and the NPC's personality, in ways we can't always predict but use our knowledge of the world to try to guess the appropriate responses.
I don't need Space Legs or any fancy stuff, just some dialogue trees pleeze!
I love Elite: Dangerous, which has led me to watch videos of the previous Elite games (I don't know how I never played them, I would've loved them back in the day). And then in Frontier, I see exactly what I'm hoping for-- dialogue trees, and I assume they were procedurally done (if I have the terms wrong, hopefully ya at least get what I mean). You could demand cargo, pretend to be injured, try to trick someone, etc etc. Sometimes it'd work, sometimes it wouldn't, and either way it creates a story and memory all on its own.
The devs are great at RNG and producing content procedurally, and I am positive they could do a great job with dialogue trees. Each NPC would have a "personality" determined by their faction, career, allegiance, hidden factors, etc, and the exact specifics and range of nuance created with RNG. The player has set messages they can send, such as the normal pirate ones, or try to befriend them, small talk, ask for any POI in the area, if they've seen a CMDR recently, if they're a cop you can try to bribe them (as in Frontier), some cops are corrupt and some NPCs try to give ya a sob story to trick ya, you can try to pull rank if ya outrank them with a Superpower, allied faction members are more friendly, and so on.
NPCs could ask for help as they realize they're about to be interdicted, or other in-world situations... stuff similar to Red Dead Redemption where ya organically come across situations where you can help or make things worse.
Countless things could be done with it, and I wouldn't expect voice acting or anything aside from branching dialogue trees that can go in a lotta different directions depending on the situation and the NPC's personality, in ways we can't always predict but use our knowledge of the world to try to guess the appropriate responses.
I don't need Space Legs or any fancy stuff, just some dialogue trees pleeze!
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