Powerplay Rendered NPCs at long last? Start to DEEPEN the Elite Universe?

[JohnnyDangerous]

Elite has constantly been criticized as being "a mile wide and an inch deep" and when compared with "living" games like Skyrim, Fallout, Mass Effect, you can see why. These text only interactions with game characters are from the 1980s, and even the new "ATC" of stations is only as good as when voice started to come in the 1990s.

So, we FINALLY get a mostly finished character generator (I say mostly because they still only have 1 body size) to much applause (even though it's an OLD piece of programming from ME1 timeframe). So can we drop these static pictures of prominent people like the PowerPlay characters and even the engineers? Make them rendered, walking talking NPCs with a personality? Have them talk through GalNet maybe?

How hard would it be to have them make speeches and direct their efforts through small video clips stating they need more defending here, undermining there, and maybe a personal pop up "Hey, thank you for x kills" or whatever? You can't make a zillion NPCs (or can the Forge do it?) but I'd think you can make a few dozen.

 

[aspiringexpatriate]

You can't make a zillion NPCs (or can the Forge do it?) but I'd think you can make a few dozen.

They have made a zillion NPCs, because what else are those contacts if not persistent NPCs? Every single faction has six mission givers, one travel coordinator, an authority contact, and a mercenary contact. So every single faction appears to have 9 persistent NPCs. Multiply that by 4 and then multiply total inhabited systems, and that's a loose estimate of how many persistent NPCs the game has already created.

And that's not counting the NPC crewmen available in crew lounge. I don't believe any of them are persistent until a CMDR hires them.

As for making these NPCs breathe and bringing them to life?

That's a hell of a lot of animation and voice acting they'd have to invest in. They already appear to be working on the voice acting, but I don't think they're pushing for casting any of the Powers. I'm assuming avatar/player/NPC/toon animated human movement (i.e. walking/floating) is somewhere in the cards to be handled by the procedural generation system. I figure they won't implement it for NPCs until they can implement it for players. So don't expect it anytime soon.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Elite has constantly been criticized as being "a mile wide and an inch deep" and when compared with "living" games like Skyrim, Fallout, Mass Effect, you can see why. These text only interactions with game characters are from the 1980s, and even the new "ATC" of stations is only as good as when voice started to come in the 1990s.

So, we FINALLY get a mostly finished character generator (I say mostly because they still only have 1 body size) to much applause (even though it's an OLD piece of programming from ME1 timeframe). So can we drop these static pictures of prominent people like the PowerPlay characters and even the engineers? Make them rendered, walking talking NPCs with a personality? Have them talk through GalNet maybe?

How hard would it be to have them make speeches and direct their efforts through small video clips stating they need more defending here, undermining there, and maybe a personal pop up "Hey, thank you for x kills" or whatever? You can't make a zillion NPCs (or can the Forge do it?) but I'd think you can make a few dozen.

The char creator is miles beyond mass effect:andromeda...