Space legs and talking to npcs

[Lordxenu]

It's a very fine balance between game mechanics and time to develop it. If you make a system that use voice, there can only be so much variation.
Check out Skyrim and the witcher games. They are both very immersive RP games, but you quickly spot the same answers and voices all over the place. Now if you take robots, they are much easier to make with the TTV software. However the world is not only made of robots so back to square one again.

A good way would be a text based system, where you pick your answer, and the NPC respond by text too. Or a combination of the two options.

Combining text and voice will make the world more alive and you will not have the same high frequent of same voices as most responses will be during a text screne.

It's not easy to make, and I can only imagine true voice interaction when you have a mission that is more or less on rails.

Its certainly an interesting challenge fdev havent done brilliantly with text interactions so far (thinking "tasty cargo") type scenarios. I would be dissapointed in space legs just stayed as boarding ships pew pew and silently leave

 

[Cosmo]

It will be text based i would think. Maybe have an option for text to speach if they have it. How they do the text though is the question. Will be interesting to see how they go about it. Could be speach bubbles or something like that. Difficult to tell.

Text to speech is quite good nowadays. Cheaper than real voice actors.

 

[VR jefranklin18]

So with character creation and potentially space legs coming i cant help but wonder how fdev will handle talking to npcs.

Will communications be text based? - im not sure id like this. It can be explained away as ship comms but standing in front of someone doesnt feel right.

Will it be repeated lines? - this tends to get boring fast unless there are millions of variations which seems improbable.

Of do you think fdev will come up with something new like a text to speech model with procedural text? It doesnt seem miles out of reach. Google seem to have a pretty good tts.

What are eveyones thoughts on how they might go about it?

Just because space legs are promised at some point in the future (presumably season 3 but I am now taking nothing for granted) it doesn't mean that there will actually be an NPCs to interact with. I fully expect my first forays out of the ship will be like the opening scenes from 28 Days Later