Tony Zurovec answers questions on NPC behavior and memory, the interdiction device and quantum travel, mission design, city size and access, crew hiring, hangars and storage, the "rescue" medical role, and long-range scanning across infrared, visible and X-ray.
There will be NPCs all around, like landing zones for example, NPCs you'd encounter walking around will be brief and varied because they have their own lives on a 24 hour clock that they're living. They will acknowledge your presence if you walk by or if you go into a bar and make a ruckus, they will react accordingly and try to move away from you or mutter under their breath about you. NPCs will interact with each other quite a bit and have conversations that vary based off what happened in that conversation. Eventually as anything you will see some repeats, but it won't happen often.
TL;DREscape from interdiction is still being worked out, but the interdictor chooses power, which sets the field's range and probability curve, trading how quickly victims can re-engage quantum against attracting more attention.
Tony can't talk much about the escape because it's still being sorted, but can talk about how you take them out. So an interdiction device will be used to pull someone out of quantum travel which will be popular with pirates of course. One of the problems when creating the device was where does it eject the person in quantum? At first they had it do it right where they were, but then it made distress beacons useless because the pirates would have already killed the person. Then they thought they would increase the distance by 5-10 miles and so it takes time and allows them to get reinforcements, but then the person would just spool up their quantum drive after 30 seconds to a minute to get away. So what they decided on an area of effect mechanic where the person who initiates the interdiction field will determine how much power to use and then that determines the range of the interdiction device is and also the shape of the curve, the shape of the curve will dictate the probability of where you'll end up. You won't always fall in the centre, you'll always want to fall in the fringe, but it depends on the shape of the curve. As you push that curve farther in, you're more likely to have people fall in that area, but that means they can re-engage their quantum engines at a much less significant distance so the person who initiates the drive will want to find the sweet spot. The downside to cranking up the power is it draws more attention to yourself such as security forces, so making the field smaller and more precise means less people get caught, but you're less likely to get detected.
It's compact right now, once 3.0 rolls out and they add more content, you'll see that distance increase. Also some ships will be faster in quantum than others, so the small ones may get away, but the big ones will get caught, they can tweak the values as well if needed.
Yes, it's a fundamental plan to have that be a part of the Universe, Tony doesn't want to expand too much as to give it away, but some NPCs will know what org you're a part of and how to deal with you accordingly or NPCs you've helped or scammed. This also dictates the conversations you have available with them as well.
TL;DRBeyond better ships and playing with others, the main incentive is new experiences, with modular tools letting them generate lots of content and add personal touches, planned for the long term.
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Cloud Imperium
The obvious answer is you're always going to try and get the better ship and play against or cooperate with players, but to Tony the thing that is really going to differentiate is the ability to experience new things. This will involve reaching cities you've never seen to new AI behaviors and new challenges and overcoming them. The approach with modular technology as a tool rather than being the only entity will allow them to generate a lot of content, but putting their personal touches and creating a unique experience for players. It's the little things that keep players coming back, it's what makes you want to keep playing. The way things are built, they've created a system that allows them to make the majority of everything, but then you can add extra touches to those creations in whatever way you would want to without the effort of creating brand new assets. They planned long term, not short term when making the tools and making the game and this allows them a lot of flexibility down the road. It can be frustrating because some things can take a little longer, but it pays off in dividends down the line.
There's your generic mission lines that while they're awesome, once you've done it, you've seen it all. Tony's logic is everything around you can be a mission in a way. If you're on a planet with a refinery and there's an asteroid belt nearby, you'll see freighters going to and from that belt, and you can help or you could destroy or board some of those freighters, loot them.
TL;DRThere is no single solution: mission boards filter crowds in big places, remote NPCs make players wait their turn or may refuse annoying players, and spread-out locations help, with tweaking expected after release.
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Cloud Imperium
There's no one single solution, and when you have an MMO, there are some things you have to sacrifice. They have mission boards instead of NPCs in larger places to filter all the individual players, but in remote areas there may be a single person you have to talk to and if someone wants to talk to them as well, they have to wait their turn. To prevent griefing, it may be a godfather scenario where if you annoy an NPC, they won't talk to you anymore or have their men "Take" you away. NPC's can pickup on situations such as someone talking to them too much or etc. There will be other ways of course, such as if someone is important, you have to book an appointment, but in the end with having the world setup the way it is, there will be a lot of places to go to that disperses the players. In the end, they still have to put it out there and see what needs to be tweaked.
The original idea for Arc Corp, was having three areas and slowly expand over time, but to a limit. Having entire cities be accessible comes with a problem that things become repetitive. Once you've seen a gunstore and a clothing shop, you'll see another one down the road with a slight variation or name. So rather than having a huge repetitive city, you'll have a condensed, but very unique area for each system. Levski is wildly different than Arc Corp so that creates a unique experience from visual alone, then there's how NPCs interact, the clothing, missions, prices.
For 3.0 no, they're still working on some of the NPC elements of having them interact with you and have them be more than just a person filling the seat. They want them to have emotions, how do they cope with a crew member dying, are they getting paid enough. They also are working on the mechanics of them and having them do the jobs you want them to do. Their goal for V1.0 of that is to have a mostly complete experience where right now for that there's still some pieces missing.
No. Right now hangars are given when you buy a ship, but in the universe you could buy some storage with X amount of space for this price. Right now they're getting deeper into that storage component where when you buy an item from Casaba Outlet, for example, and having the inventory, transaction, delivery take place on the backend and have it affect the virtual server. Post 3.0 you'll see variable prices, supply and demand and etc.
They want to have something like that in the 'Verse for filler value, something you hear on the TV in a bar, but also become a medium to disperse relevant and important information. Imagine a battle is on the news and you check your logs and you see they need mercenaries.
Tony classified the system as "rescue" in the roadmap. With rescue it can entail anywhere from rescuing a pod from space, or dispersing medicine to an infected crew or you have a space station that's falling out of orbit and it's on fire and you need to get incapacitated scientists out safely. You could do a transport mission involving a heart that's needed urgently in another location, or getting a drug that's not legal in order to treat someone and do it stealthily. Tony wants more than just healing people in a medbay, you can do that, but there's a lot of people who want to do more than that. Later on they'll release a document about how the system breaks down and what they mean when they talk about certain aspects.
It's a term Tony coined when dealing with the backend and quantum jumping and what you do with the space in between. So assuming you're going from point A to B and you've been intercepted. What happens to your escort that was with you? What the system will do is roll to dice to where to spit you out, but all the guys with you still need to come with you in some way, but not all at once where everyone suddenly drops out in the exact same place.
It's likely, they don't want a button where you press it and boom you found them. Long range scanning will be more analog in nature. You'll have passive scanning where you're collecting radiation over time, then long range scanning you'll be able to view three different spectrums such as Infrared, where it can see through gas and clouds. There will be the visible spectrum of course, but that has its drawbacks. Then there's the X-ray spectrum that can pickup EM signatures which would be great for figuring out where a ship is, but unable to determine what it is.